


How to Build a Nest: The Assignment

by vinnie2757



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, F/M, Mission Fic, Slow Burn, some smooching will happen later but for now its mostly bad flirting, there is some death but its no one important, there is some real terrible flirting omg
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-04-18 01:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 45,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14202372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: Director Fury had me come up to his office and Special Advisor Carter’s there handing me a new assignment.’‘Me,’ Barton says, because he’s not stupid, and Laura wouldn’t give him the indignity of thinking he was. ‘They want to give me a new handler.’‘No, a partner.’‘I’m not a babysitter. No offence, doll-face, but I don’t have a partner.’In which Agent Laura Harcourt is assigned to partner resident liability Clint Barton in his early years as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. They say manners maketh man and all that, but maybe it might be something a little more tangible than manners.Like a pretty girl with dreams of a farmhouse and a love of pizza, armed with bad puns and a wicked left hook.





	1. The Assignment

**Author's Note:**

> lmao whoops i wasnt meant to start another au but here we areeeeeeee
> 
> enjoy my lovelies!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laura gets a new assignment, and it goes about as well as you'd imagine.

It’s the day after a heavy rainstorm, the kind that takes power out in shitty apartments and fills the gutters with ankle-deep empty crisp packets and a little bit of water, and not for the first time, Laura wishes she had a car.

Not that it’d be remotely worthwhile having one; she’s back and forth to the bodega on the end of her street, the gym two blocks away and work, and that’s as far as it gets. She can walk to work, on nice days, and on days when it’s not so nice, she can take a cab. They even have special cabs that circle the route, but they still only take cash, and typical, Laura’d spent the last of her change on lunch yesterday, because it had been nice enough to go out for lunch.

At least Maggie on reception will let her leave her rain boots behind the desk to dry off.

And _at least_ she’s not scurrying about under an umbrella. She made half an effort today to look nice, because she’s only going to be click-clacking around HQ doing paperwork, so she doesn’t need to worry about field gear and can wear a _dress_. Fancy that, a whole entire dress.

Some of the girls get very jealous of her knees, but Laura gets jealous of their inseam, so it’s an even field when you get right down to it.

Maggie is tapping away at her computer when she arrives and kicks her boots into the front panel of the desk. It’s hardly for modesty these days, and more for people like Laura, who kick their boots into it by accident.

‘You’re late,’ Maggie says, without looking up. ‘Also hi, what a storm last night!’

Laura fishes her heels out of her bag and balances on one foot to get them on. ‘You’re telling me! Had my power out for half an hour, but the radio says Brooklyn had the worst of it. And I had to walk, spent my cash on lunch.’

‘I _told_ you the calzone wasn’t worth it! Anyway, Special Advisor Carter’s asked for you up in her office.’

‘What?’

Maggie looks up then and shrugs. ‘I don’t know, don’t blame me, she just said when you got in could you – and I quote – “have a wee and get a drink and be ready to listen.” I didn’t ask why. I thought you’d like the surprise.’

Laura, if she was another person and Maggie was another person, and they weren’t at work and were vicious enemies, might have told her to go and use the blow-up boyfriend she bought her for a joke last Christmas, but this isn’t another world and they weren’t other people, so instead she says, ‘thank you,’ in the most playfully scathing tone she can manage, and off she rushes for the elevator, Maggie calling rude things about her rain boots in her wake. Why couldn’t Director Fury – or more importantly, Maggie – have paged her, or called her landline or whatever, given her some advance warning?

She uses the mirror in the elevator to fuss with her hair, doing her best to make it more presentable than last night’s loose braid made it look and gave up when the doors opened on the Director’s floor. Special Advisor Carter doesn't technically have an office, but when she does, it's the Director's office, because that's where she's decided to be. Deeming herself a lost cause, but glad she’d opted for a dress instead of trousers, she trots off down the corridor and raps neatly at the door. 

‘Come in, Agent!’ calls the Director from inside, and Laura glances up at the camera above the door before pushing it open.

Special Advisor Carter is sat, prim and proper and with an ever-present cup of tea, and doesn’t look up from the dossier on the desk. Director Fury is stood next to her, looking at her with that unreadable expression he always has. He’s used to having his desk hijacked by the former Director, even though she hasn’t been Director for nearly a decade, because Carter just cannot seem to let go of the thing.

‘You can pry me from this agency when I am dead,’ she’d said once, when asked about retiring, ‘and I’ll still take half of its secrets to my grave with me.’

There’s one seat opposite the desk, and Carter waves an absent hand at it.

‘Do sit down, we don’t have all day.’

Laura sits down, tucks her bag behind her feet, and tries not to look nervous. She’s not sure what she’s done, given that this is the first time she’s been even only a couple of minutes late, and she’s never not filed a report.

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ Carter says, still reading her dossier. ‘You look like a frightened rabbit. You aren’t in trouble.’

Laura doesn’t relax. ‘What then – if I may ask? – am I here for?’

‘We need your expertise,’ Director Fury says, and Laura looks at him, frowns.

‘I don’t have any particular expertise,’ she says, ‘I believe my file calls me a “good all-rounder” because I just do what I'm told.’

‘And I’d thank God every day for it if I thought for a second that was going to help,’ Fury tells her. ‘But you have an expertise with people, and especially with feral dogs.’

Laura’s ears burn. ‘I’m not a dog-handler, sir. If you need one, I hear Janice in Level Four is really good with the K-9 unit.’

Carter tuts, and finally looks up, putting down the dossier to pick up her teacup. She regards Laura over it, the way she remembers her mother regarding her when she brought a bad report card home. Okay, so the bad report was because she’d been fighting tooth-and-nail with a girl who’d stolen another girl’s lunch, but that was beside the point. Laura feels very small indeed.

‘I don’t understand,’ she says.

‘We have an Agent,’ Carter says, carefully, ‘who is – he’s very good. One of our best, and it’d be an absolute shame to lose him, he’s been one of our most valuable assets since Nick found him, but he’s angry. He’s got so much anger, and so much – rebellion isn’t the word for it, but he’s become a liability, the way he behaves. Like a teenage boy, I’m sure you understand.’

 Laura does not understand; both of her brothers are older than her, and one is an accountant. The other is a trucker, but he’s never so much as drank a beer in his life.

‘I think so,’ she says, ‘you want me to – what, exactly? Tame him? I’m not a counsellor.’

‘We’d like you to partner him. He doesn’t take kindly to the handling business, he’s been driving our handlers crazy, but we think, perhaps, he might take to a partner.’

‘You mean you want a pretty girl to flash her tits at him and distract him from all the nonsense he’s pulling?’

Carter laughs, actually laughs, and Laura’s cheeks go pink as well as her ears.

‘If you think it’ll help, you’re more than welcome to try, my girl,’ she snorts, and takes a sip of tea. ‘But I doubt you’ll have to go that far, your face is pretty enough. And, don’t take this the wrong way, but you have a bit of a damsel look about you. I’m sure it’ll jumpstart some primal instinct in his brain and he’ll close rank.’

Laura doesn’t like this plan, but she’s been picked out of everyone, so she doesn’t get to deny this assignment.

‘And who, exactly, am I going to be partnering?’

‘Clint Barton.’

She can’t help herself, she bursts out laughing. She covers her mouth while she tries to rein it in, but she can’t stop it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she laughs, ‘no, no I’m sorry, I’m not going to – the man is – I’m sorry, but no, I’m afraid I’ll have to decline.’

Fury gives her a flat look. ‘This is not an assignment you can turn down, Agent Harcourt.’

They wait her out. Laura tries to wait them out. It goes as well as she expected it to, and within three minutes, she’s heaving a sigh.

‘Why?’ she asks, ‘I’m not the best person for this. I’m not a field agent, and I’ve seen support for Barton’s missions, I’m not – I don’t think I’d be able to handle him.’

‘Well, you aren’t handling him, for a start,’ Carter reminds her. ‘You’re partnering him. We’ll take you off out-of-state roster for a week or two, you can run some low-level errands, get a feel for each other. Physically, if you like, you’re his type.’

Laura’s jaw drops. Fury carefully turns to his screen on the far wall.

Then Laura collects herself, and doesn’t puff up, but does straighten her back.

‘It wouldn’t matter if I was his type,’ she sniffs, ‘he certainly isn’t mine, and I don’t believe in jeopardising my career for a quick fling with a co-worker.’

Carter raises an eyebrow, so carefully tweezed that in her greying old age, it’s almost non-existent. But it carries a certain gravitas, and Laura’s back relaxes.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she says, and then looks back at her dossier. ‘Well, you’d best go find him, then, I’m sure you know how to approach him. Where is he, Nick?’

‘In the gym on Level Seven, probably. It’s where he spends any downtime these days.’

Nobody else uses the Level Seven gym these days, and Laura had heard he was why.

‘I don’t have clearance,’ she says, and touches the Level Six card on her lanyard.

‘We’ve upgraded you for clearance to the facilities today,’ Fury says, ‘you’ll have to get him to use the communal or Level Six gym from tomorrow.’

Laura stares at them.

She’s been dismissed without words, so she gets her bag and back to the elevator she goes.

If she goes to the toilets in Level Six and sits on one of the loos and doesn’t move for ten minutes because she has her head buried in her hands, well, no one needs to be aware of that.

* * *

Laura doesn’t quite expect her card to work, but no, she’s been granted access to Level Seven. So she stands there for a second and just stares blankly at the open door before leaping through it so it doesn’t shut on her and lock her out. She’s never been in Level Seven, and to be quite frank, she never really intended to come this high. She was quite happy in Level Six, she got the missions she was comfortable with, and didn’t have to deal with the real stinkers in the agency. Because there were some real stinkers, and she’d made that fact very well known thank you very much.

The floor is mostly empty, a couple of agents milling about in that way all agents mill; striding with purpose and looking very busy and having big arguments about _Beverley Hills 90210_ , because that’s what agents are prone to do if you don’t give them missions, and Laura almost has her opinion on a storyline out of her mouth before deciding that no, no best keep her mouth shut and get to her latest assignment.

So instead she puts her head down and scurries along, knowing full well she doesn’t belong here; everyone is in uniform, and she’s very much not.

The gym is empty when she peeks through the windows, except for the figure of Clint Barton, barely in view, if she smushes her face up against the glass and looks to the side, beating the ever-loving hell out of a punching bag. He’s topless and shoeless, his fists bound with bandage but no gloves, and Laura takes a breath.

He’s one of _those_.

‘Okay,’ she tells herself, and pushes the door open.

She’s not even three steps in before Barton is whirling on his heel and pointing a finger at her.

‘Get those fuckin’ shoes off the – oh. Hello.’

She stops, foot raised, and looks at her shoes.

A little meeker now, scratching the back of his head and looking anywhere but at her, he says, ‘your heels will scratch the floor and they’ve only recently replaced it. I didn’t mean to yell.’

‘Oh! Oh, sorry, I didn’t think, sorry, let me just – ‘

She steps out of her shoes as gracefully as she can, but her skirt doesn’t have that much give in it, and she stumbles a little when she swaps feet. He’s halfway over to her when he sees the colour of her card.

‘How did you get in?’ he asks, ‘you’re only a six.’

She sniffs, overexaggerated and even puts her nose in the air.

‘I’m an eight at least, thank you very much.’

It catches him off-guard, because he replies, ‘nine if you used a different lipstick and curled your hair instead of the waves.’

This catches _her_ off-guard, and they stare at each other for a second. Then he smiles, all dimples and creased eyes and she thinks to herself that she hates Special Advisor Carter very much indeed.

What she actually thinks is, _oh no, he’s hot_.

‘No, for real, how’d you get in, you shouldn’t have access.’

She wrinkles her nose. ‘You want the truth or you wanna give me a minute longer to flub a lie? I sat on the toilet for ten minutes trying to think of what to say and in the end, I don’t know what kind of lie to tell you.’

His lips quirk, and his eyebrow raises, but he shrugs, and goes to the water bottle on the bench nearby.

‘Take a pew,’ he says, and Laura does so, puts her shoes on the bench so there is both no chance of scratching the floor, and no chance of him sitting next to her.

‘So, uh – well, it’s funny, I ran out of change, so I had to walk into work and I was late this morning, only two minutes, mind you! That’s not bad for walking from Hell’s Kitchen, and I set off late, too, because the power outage last night screwed up my shower, and – well, anyway, Director Fury had me come up to his office and Special Advisor Carter’s there handing me a new assignment.’

‘Me,’ Barton says, because he’s not stupid, and Laura wouldn’t give him the indignity of thinking he was. ‘They want to give me a new handler.’

‘No, a partner.’

‘I’m not a babysitter. No offence, doll-face, but I don’t have a partner.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t need a babysitter,’ she says, ‘and they’ve taken us both off out-of-state roster for a week and are putting us on minor errands until we can play nice.’

Barton lies down on the floor and balances his water bottle on his forehead. ‘Nope. Not happening. Tell them both I punched you in the face.’

‘I already tried that.’

‘Punching yourself in the face?’

‘Telling them no.’

‘Oh. No-go?’

‘Special Advisor Carter told me to use this week to get a feel for you, physically, if I liked.’

There’s a moment’s pause, and then Barton is laughing so hard he almost chokes. Laura sits there and watches him as he rolls over and curls into a ball and doesn’t move. She can see the dimples in his back, and his jogging bottoms are hugging his ass really nicely, and well, she’s only a woman.

She waits until he’s done, and then she says, ‘are you done with your workout? I’m fit for field duty, but if you’re – not busy – I thought maybe we could do some light sparring? Just to see what we’re working with.’

She can see what she’s working with.

‘I can’t spar with you in that,’ he says, sat on the floor now with his legs splayed and looking too comfortable, gesturing at her dress, ‘I’m not in the business of tearing dresses off pretty girls either.’

‘Lots of businesses you aren’t in,’ she says, and gets up, goes to the changing rooms; there’s always spare kit in the lockers. ‘Is there anything you are in the business of?’

But he doesn’t answer, and she glances back to find him staring at her. As soon as he’s caught, he flips to his feet and pretends to be doing something else.

‘Sweet,’ she says to herself under her breath, and the door swings shut behind her.

He’s on her the moment she’s out of the changing rooms, pouncing from behind the door and she screams as they tumble to the floor. He’s got her head braced in a hand so she doesn’t hurt herself too badly, but her shoulder’s going to be bruised and her hip aches with the weight of his leg. He holds her down for a second and then springs away, leaving her to pick herself up.

‘What the hell?’ she yells. ‘I haven’t even stretched!’

‘There’s no time to stretch on the field!’ he calls back, dancing off around the gym and she’s sure he’s just showing off that he can do standing backflips.

‘There’s always time to stretch!’

He laughs, and she almost laughs too, because he sounds _happy_. At the least, he’s energised, he’s engaged, he’s there in the moment and he’s not angry.

He will be when he sees the state of her hand-to-hand, but she’s an agent based in paperwork and support and logistics, not wrestling a man into unconsciousness with her thighs.

 When he comes back to her again, telegraphing that he’s going for another throw by yelling it at her, she’s ready for him, and almost manages to fend him off.

‘Oh, this is bad,’ he laughs, holding her pinned with one leg across her chest and his hand cradling her head again. She scrabbles at his leg, but he just squeezes her hand. ‘Who taught you to fight?’

‘The Academy,’ she pants, and rights herself, ignoring the hand he offers. ‘Passed just fine.’

‘Not top of the class?’

She springs away from the over-done sweeping kick he throws her way, and throws her own back. He catches it, and holds her off-balance before letting her go. ‘No. Middle. I can fight if I have to. Doesn’t mean I want to.’

‘Then want to,’ he shrugs, and gets her into a routine of blocking slow, gentle punches.

She’s glad he’s pulling them; she thinks if she tried to block a full punch from him, he’d break her hand.

‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

He laughs some more, and she barely ducks the punch he aims at her face. She doesn’t catch the kick to her ribs, and she topples.

‘You won’t be able to hurt me,’ he assures her, ‘not without some serious work on your left hook, anyway.’

She gets to her feet, and catches her breath, and stares at him. He’s sweaty, and panting through his nose, his hair flat to his head and his skin red where he’s landed throws. But his eyes are bright, shining in the fluorescent strips above them, and he’s watching her like a hawk watches its prey. Sharp, flickering to every little move she makes, from the flop of her ponytail to the twitch of her fingers to the way she shuffles her feet. Carter had told her to flash her tits if she thought it’d help, and she thinks it would; his gaze certainly flickers to her cleavage every time it goes past it.

 So she evaluates her strategy, and circles him a little, watching him watching her.

‘You really don’t fight, do you?’ he asks, ‘you’re lovely, but you don’t have a clue.’

‘I asked for light sparring,’ she chides, and brings her fists up, ‘not to be jumped by a half-naked man before I’m even through the door.’

‘Life’s full of little disappointments.’

‘I’m five-two,’ she tells him, ‘you are _not_ a little disappointment.’

He grins at her. ‘I’m sure there’s a joke about you being one of life’s little pleasures in there, but I’m pretty sure you’ll aim for my balls if I make it.’

She gives him a knowing look, and feigns a kick to his legs, only to aim a punch at his face. He ducks and sweeps past both, but she catches him with a second kick to the shin as he comes up out of the dodge. He laughs, and she chances another punch. It connects to his arm; it’s like punching metal.

‘Told you, you won’t be able to hurt me. Give me your best.’

She gives him a black eye.

He doesn’t stop laughing about it all the way into the showers and all the way down the corridor to the canteen.

* * *

Clint takes offence at the offerings in the canteen and says, ‘you eat pizza?’

Laura, aching in her heels but unwilling to admit that she’s black and blue under her dress, gives him a flat look. ‘I live in New York.’

‘Hell’s Kitchen, you said, right? Shit pizzas, Brooklyn’s where it’s at, but there’s a good place down the road if you wanted to share? I’ll pay, you said you don’t have change on you.’

Laura blinks, and racks her brains trying to remember when she’d said any of it. He snorts, and tells her she’d babbled when she explained why she was in the gym with him.

‘Oh, right, yeah. Sure, if you don’t mind me tailing.’

‘Nah,’ he says with a shrug, and turns smartly on his heel to head back out of the canteen, ‘some company’d be nice.’

Maggie, on her lunch break and in line, gives Laura an incredulous look as they pass. Laura gives her an incredulous look back. Maggie mouths, _tell me later_ , and then Laura’s got to scuttle to keep up with Clint’s longer stride.

‘Hey, bird-brain, I’ve got a tight skirt and short legs, slow down a minute.’

He pauses, and looks back at her. ‘Bird-brain?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ she sniffs, and he falls into stride with her. It’s surprisingly easy and comfortable to keep pace with each other, neither too fast nor too slow to trip either of them, and Laura stops noticing how he walks so close their elbows bump every other step.

He takes them to a little eatery a few blocks down, and it’s about as traditional as Laura thinks it could get; green awning, a couple tables outside, dim inside with check tablecloths and exposed brick all around the pizza oven at the back. It’s cute, and she’s surprised she’s never been here before.

‘Ah, Clinton!’

Clint groans, and plasters a smile on his face, but Laura can see from the crease in his eyes that it’s a genuine smile, beneath the affected pleasantry.

‘Vanni, hello, you’re well?’

‘As can be, my friend, as can be! Who’s your lovely girl, you never said you had a girl!’

Laura flushes, and Clint glances at her, pauses for half a second, and then turns back to Vanni.

‘She’s not my girl, Vanni, she’s a co-worker, thought I’d bring her to lunch.’

‘She give you that shiner, eh? Good on you, girl. Your table’s free, Clint, help yourself.’

‘Coffee?’ Clint asks over his shoulder, as he walks to a table near the door, but in a quiet corner.

They’re the only people in here, which is even odder.

Laura wonders, as she agrees to coffee and takes a seat, her back to the door and Clint hawk-eyed watching the street, whether she’s just walked into a mafia establishment.

‘He’s not mafia,’ Clint says, and nudges her foot. ‘He wishes he was, but no, he’s one of ours. Keeps an eye on the street for us.’

‘Ours?’ Laura asks, with a wry smile as she peruses an old laminated menu. ‘You mean one of yours.’

At this, Clint leans back in his chair and studies her.

‘You’ve got your own little network,’ she adds, ‘all sorts of people, all over town. I’ll bet you’ve made friends with everyone in your apartment building, and they bring you all sorts of gossip so that you’re abreast of everything that goes on, at least in your part of the city. You have a dog, so you’re friends with the vets and the pet store employees, and they’ll tell you gossip too.’

He smiles, just a little, barely a twist of his lips. ‘You’re sharp.’

‘I’m paid to pay attention, sir,’ she replies, and leans back a little when Vanni comes back with two coffees.

‘He never introduced you,’ Vanni says, and extends a hand. ‘Giovanni, ma’am.’

‘Laura,’ she replies, and laughs when he kisses her knuckles.

‘Have you a little Italian in you?’ he asks, giving her a too astute frown. ‘You’ve got very Italian eyes.’

She laughs some more. ‘On my grandmother’s side, yes, sir, she emigrated just after the war. From Caprioli.’

‘Salerno!’ he nods, ‘wonderful place. Very sunny. Are you ready to order?’

She blinks at Clint, who shrugs. ‘Get what you like. I’ll have my usual.’

‘Boring,’ Vanni says, and waits patiently for Laura to continue skimming the menu before making her choice. ‘Wonderful! Be back with you shortly.’

He gets a few paces away and turns back, ‘where’s your dog?’

‘At home. He worked hard last week, I’m giving him some time off. My neighbour’s going to take him for a walk after school.’

Vanni nods, and off he goes to get their orders on the go.

‘He’s… Something,’ Laura says.

‘A good man,’ Clint nods, and regards her over his coffee. ‘Did they really pull us off out-of-state roster for a week?’

She raises her eyebrows and her shoulders. ‘They said that they don’t want to lose you, but your anger is a liability. They want me to calm you down.’

Clint’s expression darkens, and Laura wonders if he might throw the table and storm off and kick the glass out of the door on his way, but then the storm clears and he snorts.

‘I’m not that angry,’ he says, ‘I just don’t appreciate being treated like a lapdog.’

‘I couldn’t say,’ she says, diplomatically. ‘All I know is they want me to follow you around and wiggle my ass for a month or two.’

‘You don’t have to wiggle it,’ he assures her, ‘I’m sure it gets enough attention without distracting me. I never miss a shot, and I’m not about to start.’

She smiles, and something she didn’t know was knotted behind her shoulders unravels.

They eat lunch, laugh and joke and he rests his feet on her chair, and they head back to work.

‘Oh,’ she says, as he goes to trot off in whatever direction he’s going, ‘I’ve only got Level Seven access for today, so can you work out in Level Six’s gym from tomorrow? Or the communal one, just so I can get to you?’

‘So you can do your reports, you mean,’ he replies, tossing it over his shoulder. ‘Sure, whatever gets them off your back. See you tomorrow, Agent.’

He throws her a hand, and then vanishes through a door and she’s left stood in a corridor on her own with no idea what just happened. Pursing her lips, she goes to the rec room and scribbles out a report, because she doesn’t know what else to do.

* * *

Her pager beeps in the middle of the night.

+++ **MISSION DEBRIEF 3AM+++**

‘Great,’ she grumbles at it before forcing herself out of bed and going to the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth.

It doesn’t take her long to get ready, and she made sure to get some money out to make change before she came home, so she can get a cab into work. Three is an early time for a debrief, though, and it means she’s needed the other side of the state by morning, and hopes Clint doesn’t bail on her. She thinks they made something like progress yesterday, because he hadn’t immediately shut her down, and he’d only been mildly offended by her presence, considering what she was there for, and she’d been honest with him, which she thinks is the best approach. Just be honest with the guy, and he can take it or leave it, and he’d seemed to have taken it for now.

‘It’s bullshit,’ Clint says, from the shadows outside HQ, as Laura approaches the doors, and she nearly screams and kicks him in the balls. ‘Whoa, it’s only me, calm down.’

‘Don’t sneak up on me, then!’ she exclaims, wagging a finger. ‘What’s bullshit?’

He holds the door for her and she ducks under his arm to get inside.

‘This mission. I heard about it before I left for the night. Some arms dealer bullshit on the other side of the state.’

‘What time did you leave?’ she asks, incredulous. ‘I haven’t heard anything about it.’

‘About two hours ago,’ he shrugs, ‘overheard Coulson talking about it, guess he’s going to be on our support, make sure I play nice.’

‘He’s nice,’ Laura nods, ‘he always says hello if I see him in base.’

‘I’m surprised he gets any work done, the way he talks to everyone,’ Clint snorts, and beeps his badge.

Laura beeps hers and hurries after him. She’s in trousers and flats now, because it’s three in the morning and she’s got no patience, so it’s not so difficult this time.

Debrief is in one of the side rooms on the first floor, so Clint jumps up the stairs three at a time, and Laura does her best to keep up.

‘How do you do it?’ she asks, panting a little. She’s fit enough, but stairs get everybody, one way or another.

‘Carefully,’ Clint replies, ‘broke my nose jumping over a banister once.’

Laura looks at his nose as they head down the corridor and doesn’t think his nose looks particularly broken. But S.H.I.E.L.D. medics are the best in the field, they’ll have set it nicely.

‘An arm’s dealer, though?’ she asks, ‘I’d say that’s below us, but we’re on local errands.’

‘I don’t know,’ he shrugs, and holds the door for her. ‘We’ll find out.’

Agent Rodriguez is waiting for them in the debrief room, with dossiers and a thermos of coffee on a tray with mugs and creamer. Clint makes straight for it, and wordlessly makes Laura a mug, the way she’d made it in the eatery at lunch. Rodriguez watches it in wordless aplomb, and then, when they’re sitting, settled and slurping at their drinks, shoves the dossiers over to them.

‘Anthony Ryan,’ he says.

‘Prick,’ Clint grunts around his mug.

‘Language,’ Laura chides around hers.

Clint’s ears go pink.

Rodgriguez clears his throat, and gestures at their dossiers.

‘I know this is a little out of your zone, Harcourt, but it’s right in Barton’s, and we need him brought in.’

‘Alive, I’m guessing?’ Clint asks.

‘Preferably. I mean, I think we’d all rather nobody died, but I’d rather him than you. The power vacuum will be filled and we’ll take them in.’

Laura is reading the dossier; Clint hasn’t touched his. ‘Buffalo? That’s a six hour drive from here, but he’s selling tonight, at a club, so we’ll have to move fast to intercept.’ She reads a little further, noticing Clint still hasn’t touched his dossier. ‘We have cover as potential buyers, I’m a wealthy heiress setting up a syndicate in Idaho, Clint’s my right hand man and muscle.’

‘Charming,’ Clint grunts, still in his coffee.

‘We thought it might be a little more believable if Agent Harcourt went in there in her highest heels and prettiest dress.’

‘My prettiest dress was fifty bucks from a Macy’s sale, but sure.’

Clint’s expression reads as one of complete confusion and utter bewilderment, and honestly Laura is bewildered as to how she thought a fifty buck dress was a worthy expenditure when she’s never worn the damn thing.

Still, she supposes it’ll be a good test of his focus. She only bought it because it looked like the one Cindy Crawford wore, even though it was nothing like that one Cindy Crawford wore. It was red and too tight and what more could she say?

‘As long as you look the part, I doubt Ryan will know what the dress cost.’

The unspoken comment about her breasts goes unspoken, but not unheard, because of course she’s going to have to put a push-up bra in her bag. She can feel her eyes rolling, but they stay focused on the dossier, which Clint still hasn’t touched.

‘So we get him, bring him in,’ Clint says, ‘where, when, to who?’

‘You can drop him at the safehouse in Buffalo,’ Rodriguez says, ‘unless you feel like driving him all the way back.’

Clint and Laura look at each other and shrug.

‘Might as well, we’ve got to come back here anyway,’ Clint says. ‘You can drive back, and I’ll drive there, that way I can deal with Ryan if he tries anything.’

‘You think he’ll try anything?’

‘I wouldn’t want you getting hurt if he does,’ Clint shrugs, and Laura frowns at her dossier.

She misses the look that crosses Rodriguez’s face.

‘Where’s Coulson, anyway?’ Clint asks the other agent, ‘thought it was on my file he’s my handler?’

‘He’s busy in Atlanta,’ Rodriguez says, ‘but I’ve worked with Harcourt before, you can deal with it, can’t you?’

Clint pulls a face, and it isn’t a very nice one. Laura moves to rest a hand on his arm.

‘I’ll be handling all the comms, anyway,’ she says, ‘this is my area; you focus on getting Ryan in custody.’

 Clint gives her a dirty look but nods, and agrees. ‘Fine, fine. You take long to pack? I packed before I came.’

‘Um, no, I shouldn’t take long, I just need to pack my dress and such.’

He gets to his feet. ‘I’ll get the car, meet you out front.’

And like that, he’s gone, leaving his dossier behind. Rodriguez sighs, and takes it back. Laura holds onto hers to read over again while Clint drives.

‘Does he do that a lot?’ she asks.

‘From what Coulson says, that’s best behaviour for him. He’s normally cursing up a storm and threatening to just kill everyone to save the trouble.’

She winces. ‘That’s…. angry.’

‘I hear Fury warned you,’ he says, and she looks at her dossier.

‘Does he never read his dossiers?’

‘Not from anything I’ve heard, he doesn’t. You got any questions?’

She hasn’t, so she hurries back to the entrance to wait for Clint to pull the car around. He’s picked a sleek looking sedan, and it’s nice enough to not attract attention while looking like the kind of car a rich girl would have if she wanted to avoid attention.

‘I’ll drive you to yours,’ he says as she gets in, ‘quicker than waiting.’

‘You want to come up?’ she asks, and then freezes.

He waits, but she doesn’t take it back, so he says, ‘for what, exactly?’

‘Coffee, while I pack. Better than sitting in the car, isn’t it?’

He looks at her as they idle at traffic lights. She resolutely doesn’t look back at him.

‘I’ve already had a shower tonight,’ she says, ‘I’m not about to have another one because you got frisky.’

He barks out a laugh. ‘ _I_ got frisky? Me? Are you sure it’s not you who can’t keep your hands to yourself? I saw you staring.’

‘Wondering how you ever learned to drive,’ she replies, ‘the light’s green.’

He nearly stalls the car, but he gets them to her place without incident. She’s sure he hit a pothole deliberately, though, and she tries not to smile when he gets out of the car too.

‘I want advance warning of this dress,’ he says, by way of explanation, but she sees him scouting the street as she searches for her keys.

Her apartment is small, but it’s big enough for her. A separate bedroom, a bathroom, an open kitchen and living area. She has a TV she barely watches and a couch she sometimes sleeps on, and a balcony, with blackout curtains hung ceiling to floor, hiding the view outside. But it is almost four in the morning, and she’d be strange to have her curtains open in Hell’s Kitchen in the middle of the night.

‘Make yourself at home, I don’t have a coffee maker, just instant.’

He tuts at her, and she shrugs, heads for the bedroom.

‘I prefer tea,’ she says.

He clatters about the kitchen while she rifles through her underwear for the seamfree knickers that will probably be the best bet for this dress, and for the most part she ignores him. She does pause for a moment on hearing him whistling, but something about it is so needlessly domestic that she finds herself packing slower to listen to him.

When she’s not done a few minutes later, he comes to find her with two mugs in hand.

‘I made you tea,’ he says, and offers her a mug. ‘Your choice of instant is garbage, I wrote a note to tell you what the good one is.’

‘Oh,’ she says, a bit taken aback by him really making himself at home. ‘Thank you!’

He takes a seat at her dressing table, mercifully free of being the Clothes Chair, and looks around her bedroom. She’s not a feminine woman particularly, but she’s decorated the bedroom over the months with soft paintings and girly sort of things, photos and flowers and a painting of an elephant.

‘I like elephants,’ she says, seeing him studying it.

‘Looks like it’s from India,’ he says.

‘Met a contact in India,’ she tells him, and stands there looking at it, sipping at her tea. It’s over-brewed, but she’s touched. ‘It was just a routine operation, information sharing, international training, that kind of thing. She was a painter, gave me that as a thank you for teaching her how to use the bullshit new coding system.’

‘Sweet.’

She downs the tea as quickly as she can, to avoid the worst of the bitterness, and finishes off packing.

‘A red dress,’ he says, when she gets it out of the wardrobe. ‘Classic.’

Smiling, she finally takes the label off. It’s been in her wardrobe for two years, there’s really no need for it now.

‘Yeah, it was my treat to myself for making Level Six. I’ve never worn it.’

‘Obviously. It’ll look good on you, you’ve got good colouring for red.’ He pauses, and she can feel his eyes on her back as she puts the dress in her overnight bag. ‘I think you’d look better in purple, though. It would bring out your eyes in a different way.’

It takes her by surprise; she’d been sure he was going to make some quip about looking better in his bed, but no. A genuine comment.

‘I’ll look into purple,’ she promises, and he nods, downs his coffee and gets to his feet.

‘I’ll wash these up and wait in the car,’ he says, and disappears.

She checks everything is locked and off and not going to burn her apartment down while she’s gone, and then she takes her bag to the car, where Clint is staring at nothing in particular in the kind of way that suggests he’s staring at _everything_.

‘All done,’ she says, sliding into the passenger seat and tossing her bag onto the backseat.

‘Girls,’ he sniffs, as though it’s a retort, and turns the car back on.

Soon enough, they’re on their way, and for the most part, they’re quiet. Laura asks a few questions, here and there, but Clint doesn’t seem to be in a talkative mood, so she leaves him be, and focuses on their mission dossier. Clint drives relaxed enough, puts the radio on for a few hours as they drive along the I-80, but turns it off again when the news drags on for two seconds too long and they return to silence. Laura makes notes in the margins of her dossier.

‘How do you do that?’ Clint asks, ‘read and write while you’re in a car? I can’t read when I’m sat still, never mind being jostled by potholes.’

‘You aren’t paid to read while you’re being jostled by potholes,’ Laura says around her pencap, and then, ‘you didn’t open your dossier at all.’

‘Never do,’ he admits. ‘If I have to, I’ll just – find the key words and hope for the best.’

She looks at him, and recaps her pen.

‘Don’t make it a thing,’ he says, ‘as you said, I’m not paid to read while in a car, and that’s what you’re here for. You do the reading, I’ll do the shooting.’

She goes a bit grey at that. ‘I hope you don’t! I’m not here for shooting.’

‘It tends to happen,’ he says, ‘especially with arms dealers. They like to show off the merchandise, as though we’re going to buy it when they’re firing it at us.’

‘You’ve done this before?’

‘Course I have. It’s what I’m paid to do.’

She studies him for a moment, and tells him he needs to get a haircut, the weird crew cut thing he’s got doesn’t suit him.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he snorts, and they fall silent again.

Laura spends the remainder of the drive playing with her hair to find a style to hide her earpiece, using the sun visor’s mirror as an aide. She’s sure Clint hits every pot hole he can, just to wind her up. She has two older brothers, and ignores him until he grows bored.

* * *

The safehouse has food, so they eat, and they alternate naps on the couch while the other reads the dossier (Laura) or stares into space (Clint) before it’s deemed time to shower and get ready for the deal to go down. Clint lets Laura shower first, and she’s as quick about it, but she’s not as quick as him, and he comes into the bedroom to get his suit as she’s wriggling into her dress.

‘Get lost,’ she says, and doesn’t bother trying to hide her knickers, since he’s already seen them and she’s stuck doing an impression of a coat rack.

‘You need a hand?’

‘Nope, I got into this when I bought it, and I haven’t put weight on, it’s just one of those wriggly dresses, I’m used to it.’

Clint sits on the end of the bed in his boxers and a t-shirt, and looks at her wriggling the dress down inch by inch.

‘Is that what you’re like in the morning, getting ready for work?’ he asks, ‘because this is gold.’

‘I don’t wear dresses this tight to work,’ she tells him, ‘and even if I did, I’d make sure they had zips at the back, not at the side.’

Finally she gets it down, and does the zip up and shakes her hair out. Clint’s still watching her so she does a twirl.

‘What do you think? Hair and makeup still to do, of course, but rich arms dealer heiress enough, do you think?’

‘We’re going to get into trouble,’ he replies, and pulls his suit off the wardrobe door.

There was no need for them to both be in the same room, given that the other agents were out on a mission, but it kept things streamlined, she supposes. She sits and does her makeup while he messes around with his tie behind her. His socks don’t match, and it’s so endearing she nearly stabs herself with her mascara watching him doing his tie. He’s left-handed, she’d never noticed until she watches the way he flips the silk around.

Pinning her hair in a low bun behind her ear, the only way she’d found to hide the earpiece successfully, she straps herself into her shoes, and gets to her feet.

‘I’m glad I’m deaf,’ Clint says, and she hums. ‘The hair business. My hearing aids _are_ part of my comms so I don’t have to hide anything.’

‘One of life’s little pleasures?’ she teases.

‘Yeah,’ he grins back, ‘I get to turn everyone off when I get bored of them.’

She wonders how often that is, but keeps quiet and follows him out to the car.

* * *

‘Laura! Get down!’

And Laura, being a Level Six S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, and highly trained in both common sense and the ability to follow orders, doesn’t get down, she turns to where Clint is, and the arrow he looses as she does skims past her shoulder, ripping through the fabric of her dress and drawing blood. She drops at the same time as the arrow connects with the target behind her, and she scrambles out of the way of further projectiles.

The mission has gone to shit, but she snatches up one of the fallen dealers’ guns and pops a few kneecaps on her way behind the bar to hide. She’s not proud of hiding, but she’s just been friendly-fired by her own inability to listen, so she’s staying out of the goddamn way and letting Clint pick up the mess.

It’s not the first time instinct has gone the wrong way, and the mission had gone to shit long before it did, but she’s shaken and she knows she’s shaken, and she knows she should call for backup from the safe house. They aren’t assigned to this, and they’re meant to be doing another mission, but they’d come, if they aren’t already on their way. She’s going to get her ass sanctioned over this, and Fury’s going to chew her hide, and she just wants to lie down.

‘Hey,’ Clint says, and her vision focuses on him, crouched in front of her and a hand on either side of her face. ‘You hit anywhere else?’

She studies him studying her, his blue eyes wide and watching her so intensely. The room is silent, except for some groans, and settling dust.

‘I fucked up,’ she says, and he nods.

‘Yeah, you did. Thanks for the scare. Thought I’d hit you deeper than I did for a second there. I’ve got Ryan secured, but looks like I’m driving, hey?’

She shakes herself, rolls her shoulder. It hurts like a bitch, but it’s a graze.

‘I’m alright,’ she says, ‘it’s my left shoulder, I’ll barely move it driving, I’ll be fine.’

‘Six hours is a long-ass time, honey,’ he says, and the endearment makes her flush past the drained colour in her face. ‘The moment you feel tired, we’ll pull over. There’s a styptic pencil in the car, won’t help much, but should get us back to base.’

She laughs, and shakes him off. Her face feels cold. ‘I’m fine, I mean it. It was the shock of getting hit with an arrow more than the actual injury. I didn’t think you’d bring a bow.’

‘I will always bring a bow,’ he laughs, and helps her to her feet amongst the wreckage of broken bottles and peanuts. ‘What did you think I’d brought in the case? A violin? Come on, we’ll have to phone it in. We’ll make a good team, once we get you a little more trained up. Not getting down when I yell at you, honestly, who the hell trained you at the Academy, I’m going to write a formal letter of complaint.’

‘I refuse to believe you can write,’ Laura says, and Clint elbows her, gentle as a feather, before collecting the unconscious Ryan and hauling him over his shoulders.

‘Hey,’ he says, as they head back to the car, ‘I was right, though.’

Laura gets into the driver’s seat and hums. ‘Oh?’

‘Yeah, I said we were going to get into trouble, and look at this.’

‘No more red dresses for me,’ she snorts, and he buckles himself in.

‘I don’t know,’ he shrugs. ‘I think it can stay.’

* * *

They drive back to base in easy silence. Ryan kicks up a fuss, but Clint handles him nicely, without violence, and doesn’t even demand Laura pull over until hour four when she begins hugging the edge of the lane a little too much, and she dozes off for the last twenty minutes, waking up only after Clint’s parked and kicked Ryan out of the car. She stumbles after them, her heels too high and the dress too tight.

‘You go to the infirmary,’ Clint tells her, ‘I’ll book him in and come down to see you to take you home.’

‘That your girlfriend, is it?’ Ryan asks, and Clint’s kick to the back of his knee nearly breaks it.

His yowl of pain follows Laura down the corridor, but she finds it hard to feel sorry for him.

It doesn’t take long for them to patch her up – as long as she keeps it clean and tidy and doesn’t irritate it, it will heal without a scar, and she doesn’t need to be taken off active roster, just not on any more hi-jinks until it’s fully healed – and she leaves the infirmary to find Clint waiting with two report dossiers in his hand.

‘Thought you’d want to write it up at home,’ he says with a shrug, when she asks about it.

‘You’re welcome to stay and write yours,’ she says, because despite the teasing, she knows he can write, at least, as long as there’s no potholes. ‘I wouldn’t mind the company.’

‘I should get back to Lucky,’ he says, ‘been almost two days since I was at home properly, and the neighbours are good, but.’ He shrugs. ‘Not the same when you’re not taking care of him.’

She nods. ‘I understand. What breed is he?’

They talk about his dog and the pitfalls of caring for a retriever when you work away, all the way to the car and to her place, and Laura half leans across the gearstick to kiss him when he pulls up. But then she catches herself and clears her throat.

‘So I’ll, um. I’ll see you at work tomorrow?’ she asks, ‘do some, uh. I don’t know. As long as we don’t get another mission, we can always – ‘

‘We’ll find some mischief to get into,’ he promises her with a wink. ‘Go on, get inside, have a bath, get that report written, I’ll want to copy it in the morning before we hand it in.’

‘I knew it!’ she exclaims, and shoves at his arm before opening the door. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Clint.’

‘Not if I see you first,’ he replies, and waits until she’s through the door to drive off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- this is set in the 90s, so laura reckoning fifty bucks for a macys sale wasn't far off the almost 100 it'd be in todays money god bless the 90s im going to have to reference so much its gonna be greattttttt  
> \- the elephant painting in her bedroom can be seen in AoU behind Clint and Laura just after the kids come running downstairs (it's by the doors into the living area and i am a sucker for elephants)  
> \- cindy crawford was a style icon of the early 90s, i've had to google all sorts of stuff for this au bc i was a baby  
> \- you bet your ass im running with deaf and dyslexic clint in this au, i have always said he's dyslexic and i will die before i let it go  
> \- hope you enjoyed, my lovelies~!


	2. Team Bonding I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laura is going to be a problem, but Clint is nothing if not a professional.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good golly miss molly another update? Am i enjoying this too much? You bet it!
> 
> Enjoy, my lovelies~!

Laura is going to be a problem.

This isn’t to say, Clint reasons, that she’s _bad_. She’s not, she’s good. Which is only part of the problem. After several minutes of staring at the punching bag and not punching it, he’s narrowed the list down to the following items:

1\. She’s pretty. This is a problem on several levels, not least she’s everything he hadn’t realised he likes, from golden eyes, to messy hair, to being short, to having a nice ass, to having a smile that literally lights up the entire room, good fucking _God_.

2\. The prettiness is not as distracting to him as he thought it would be, but going on a mission with her where there are other straight men with eyeballs is going to be a problem. He’ll have to work overtime to keep her safe, because she seems utterly oblivious of how pretty she actually is. She jokes about being an eight, and she’s easily an eight, and probably would still be an eight after spending all night throwing up and getting it in her hair and all that. But he doesn’t think she realises what an eight actually is on a red-blooded man’s scale. She’s out of everyone’s league whilst still maintaining the girl-next-door look that acts like a gravitational field. She’s easily the loveliest woman he’s ever seen in his twenty-something years on this godforsaken rock, and that’s a problem.

3\. She’s smart. This is expected of a Level Six agent, because you don’t just get assigned to Level Six without proving you are a capable adult. And she’d sussed him out by lunchtime, and he doesn’t even think Fury’s told her half of it, if any of it. She certainly hasn’t got access to his file, because that was classified from the very beginning. But she’s worked enough of it out that he _likes_ her, and that’s troublesome for this no-partnering thing he’s angling for.

4\. She’s likeable. Again, tough for not being partners.

5\. She’s terrible at fist-fights. He can fix that, but again, missions will be spent keeping her out of trouble.

6\. She’s a fundamentally good person who doesn’t swear as often as she could, and who sees the good in him, and who could actually be an angel sent to earth, and this is really, really bad when you consider that he’s not a good person. He’s a murderer, for a start, and sure, he didn’t kill anyone on that mission, but he could have, and it would have been very easy to do.

7\. He’s already gotten her hurt once. Again, he can fix that, and if he ever hurts her again, he’s going to just kill himself to save himself the embarrassment.

8\. But it’s not like he _missed_ , she got in the way, so that kind of erases 7’s point.

7.2. She’s handy with a gun, but he’d rather she didn’t use one at all, thanks.

8.2. He likes her. Shit.

There are plenty more things to say about Laura and all the problems he has with her, but sitting outside Fury’s office to inform him of all these issues, he finds that they mostly resolve around the fact he’s lonely, and she’s nice, and he kind of likes her a lot already, and he doesn’t want to be the reason she gets killed.

‘You’re an idiot,’ Fury says, when Clint tells him this. ‘I know what I'm doing.’

‘And I know what I’m about,’ Clint counters, like he’s ever been able to properly take Fury on, or like he even really has an argument and isn’t just self-flagellating for something to do. ‘I don’t have partners for a reason.’

‘Yes,’ Fury says, dry as sand, ‘because you’re such a terrible man and so full of tragedy.’

Clint narrows his eyes, but the dry look Fury gives him tells him not to take it as personally as the attack on his sensibilities is.

‘She’ll be good to you, Barton,’ Fury tells him, ‘just give her a month or two, and then I’ll reassign her. You’ll barely go on any missions in that time.’

Clint frowns at his knees, and then says, ‘aren’t you going to sanction me for the friendly-fire?’

‘She’s alright,’ Fury says, ‘beating herself up over not getting out of the way, so I’ll probably send you on a team-building exercise once Coulson’s back in New York.’

Clint wrinkles his nose. ‘I don’t want to do more team-building exercises,’ he says, ‘the last one nearly killed me.’

‘The way Coulson tells it, you nearly killed yourself.’

Clint had sworn Coulson to secrecy until death about that fucking trap.

‘I hate him,’ Clint says.

‘No you don’t. Now stop beating yourself up over nearly killing a pretty girl and go irritate the shooting range by hiding in the rafters or whatever it is you do when you think no one’s watching.’

‘I sit in the rafters _once_ ,’ Clint protests on his way to the door. ‘Once! And suddenly everyone thinks I’m some kind of bird.’

He thinks he hears Fury say, ‘you certainly have the brain of one,’ as he leaves, but when he looks back, Fury is busy with his paperwork.

So he goes to find Laura, in the rec room doing paperwork, and tells her they’re going to the gallery.

‘To look at art?’ she asks, and Clint fights the sigh welling up in him.

Her hair’s up in a messy bun with three pens in it and she’s wearing a blouse and skirt and she looks lovely and her eyes are wide and there’s pen on her cheek and her lipstick’s faded and smudged around the lip of the teacup next to her and he kind of wants to just. He doesn’t know. Hold her hand and stuff.

‘No, to shoot.’

She frowns. ‘Those artworks are priceless, Clint, we couldn’t possibly – oh, you mean the shooting range, right.’

Oh no, he thinks, and refuses to finish the thought, because it’s been two days and he has better manners than to say something stupid like the L word.

‘Range, yeah.’

She scratches at an eyebrow, and then says, ‘sure, let me just finish this paragraph.’

He helps himself to a seat in the other armchair at the table, and watches her from the corner of his eye as he surveys the room. There aren’t many other agents in here, but they all glance at him before going back to their thing. He’s not surprised; he doesn’t think he’s ever been in here before, and he’s certainly never sat down to look relaxed. They’ll be gossiping about him being around her for days, and he feels sorry for her. She didn’t choose this partnership.

‘How long do you reckon it’ll last?’ he asks, and she hums.

‘A couple minutes,’ she says, absently, ‘nearly done, sorry.’

He smiles despite himself. ‘No, I mean this. Us.’

‘A month at most,’ she shrugs, and sticks her tongue between her teeth until she dots the last period and caps her pen. ‘I can’t imagine they’ll keep us together longer that we’d need to be to get you – palatable.’

‘You saying I'm not edible?’ he asks, and watches her gather the paperwork into a folder and tuck it under her arm.

‘I’m saying you’re sand in the cogs of the machine,’ she says, and that’s not what she said at all. ‘They want me to round off your last few rough edges, I guess. Make you into someone who’ll work with everyone.’

‘I don’t work with anyone,’ he says, and follows her out of the rec room.

‘Well, you do now, so it’s something you can put on your resume,’ she snorts. ‘You play well with me, don’t you?’

‘How’s your shoulder?’ he asks, and she rubs at it beneath her blouse.

‘It’s fine, thanks. Doesn’t hurt so much now they’ve worked their magic, but I’m not to overdo it for a couple weeks.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and catches her elbow to pull her to a stop. ‘I should have adjusted my shot, I’ll never do it again.’

She smiles at him, and rests her hand on his arm. His skin is warm, like he’s been out in the sun until just a second ago.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she says, ‘and you didn’t miss the shot, so it’s not like your streak is broken, hey? You never miss, you said. And I’ll be sure to get down, next time. Stupid, really, that I didn’t.’

‘I called the Academy last night,’ he admits, and tries not to miss her hand as she drops it. ‘And told them to change their training, gave them a real piece of my mind.’

 ‘And I bet they listened to every word.’

‘They hung up twice, and didn’t answer the third time I called,’ he tells her, and she laughs.

‘I’d feel sorry for HR if it wasn’t HR.’

‘Our HR’s good,’ Clint says.

‘They hired you,’ she retorts, and he concedes the point.

They get into the elevator, and something deep in Clint’s gut tells him to suggest making out. He stamps on the thought before it can solidify into some stupid words coming out of his mouth, and instead settles for resting his weight on the leg closer to her, so he’s almost brushing arms. It’s not like he does it deliberately, but there is an oddly soothing quality to having her close enough that a deep breath lets him feel the cotton of her blouse on his elbow.

And she doesn’t pull away, which is nice.

‘You used a gun in the club,’ he says, and she hums.

‘I did.’

‘Not bad shots, if I remember rightly.’

‘I was on the floor by that point, so knees were the best I could do.’

He finds himself frowning, and he must be gripping the rail, because her hand touches his.

‘Don’t beat yourself up over it,’ she tells him, ‘I should have gotten down when you told me.’

He looks at her, to find her turned towards him, her eyes so gold in the lights above them that he wonders, in not so many words, whether this is what the shepherds saw when they saw the angel that came to tell them about Jesus. He’d follow her anywhere, he thinks, if she asked nicely, and looked at him the way she’s looking at him right now.

‘I hurt you,’ he says, ‘and I – I never should have been able to. I should have missed you, I wasn’t aiming for you.’

‘I should hope you weren’t,’ she chuckles, and squeezes his hand, still on the railing and gripping so tight it’s shaking. ‘Clint, I’m fine, I promise. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t, would I? Look, I’ll show you.’

And she goes to undo her blouse, right there in the goddamn elevator, because that is just the kind of person Laura seems to be, and he can’t quite get his brain around it fast enough to stop her getting the top three buttons undone as the elevator judders to a stop and the doors open to three other agents standing there waiting. Clint’s got his hands on her wrists, and Laura’s got her blouse half undone, and it’s not a very good look for either of them, with them staring at each other like they’re both surprised.

Which they are, because Clint doesn’t remember grabbing her wrists to stop her, or stepping so close he’s actually kind of stood on her toes, but here he is.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ the agent in front chortles.

‘Fuck off, Brock,’ Clint snaps, and twists to get in front of Laura while she goes tomato red and rushes to do her blouse back up.

The agent raises his hands, and looks away from them as Clint shoulders past him and Laura scurries after, her head down and heat radiating off her face. They laugh too loudly as they step into the now empty elevator, and Clint’s half-turned back when Laura grabs his arm and keeps him walking.

‘Don’t,’ she says, ‘don’t even start.’

‘I’m not letting them – ‘

‘They aren’t doing anything,’ she says, and he hates that he’s walking with her, even though he’s still looking over his shoulder.

The elevator is long gone, but he could beat it if he ran up the stairs fast enough.

‘They exist,’ he replies.

‘That’s angry,’ she tells him, and he takes a deep breath. ‘Besides, I’m the one who nearly got my tits out in an elevator.’

‘To show me an injury I’d caused!’ he cries, and Laura flinches back, just a little, and he winces himself for how loud he was. ‘Sorry, sorry, indoor voice.’

It makes her smile, and she squeezes his arm before letting go.

‘C’mon, you wanted us to go to the range, and we’ll go to the range, and I’ll show you the scab later, if you behave yourself.’

She’s giving him a sly grin that’s too full of promise to be genuine, so he gives her the filthiest leer back he can manage.

‘Is that a promise?’ he asks, going for coy and missing by a steady mile.

She bumps his hip with hers and strides off for the check-in. ‘If you play your cards right.’

He stands there gawking at her for a moment before rushing after her.

* * *

 

Spending time with her is easy. She’s funny and challenging and nice, and it’s all very troublesome, but time flies, and they’d used too many bullets. But he’s still pressed up against her back, steadying her aim and doing his best to show her what he sees.

‘You must have better eyesight than me,’ she keeps saying, with a shake of her head that makes her hair tickle his cheek. ‘I can just see the rings.’

‘That’s all you need to see, just angle your shot to account for drop-off.’

She’s been trying her best to hit a bullseye for the last few hours, but she can’t do it. His patience is endless; she’s already lost hers and stamped her feet over it. She didn’t yell, though, just stamped her feet several times and then got right back to it.

It’s the cutest thing he’s ever seen in his entire life and he hates her for it.

After the first hour or so, his belly stops turning over itself, and the smell of her honey-and-vanilla skin becomes just one of those things. Her hands are soft, and she fits perfectly under his arms, and he just wants to stay here forever, but the thought gets buried so deep at the back of his mind that he almost tells her to fuck off.

‘You’re getting better,’ he assures her. ‘And you don’t need to get a bullsye, just a solid chest shot is enough.’

‘I’m not aiming to kill anyone,’ she says, and he can’t stop the low noise in the back of his throat.

She stiffens, but before he can stop himself, he says, ‘if the choice comes to killing someone of them killing you, I don’t want to be taking your body back to base.’

The air goes cold, and he realises that it was an overstep, even though it’s perfectly true, and perfectly logical. He steps away from her, and clears his throat.

‘I think you’ve done enough for now,’ he says, ‘the strain will hit your arms soon, and the doctor said to rest your shoulder.’

She stays staring at the target for a solid ten seconds, and before he can say her name, she empties the remains of the clip into the target, and misses every single one.

‘Okay,’ he breathes, gentle, like he’s talking to a trapped deer, and approaches her, takes the gun from her hands. ‘Okay, we’ll call it there, no more shooting today.’

She’s shivering, a little, vibrating with energy and he doesn’t quite know what to do. He hopes she’s not going to cry.

‘We won’t go on missions like that, will we?’ she asks. ‘I know we’re only off out-of-state for a week, but they won’t send us on kill-not-capture missions, will they? I’ve never – I mean I’ve had missions where we’ve had to eliminate a target, but not when I was on the field. I’ve always run support on any mission like that, or I’ve been out of the area doing a different task.’

 He puts the safety on, puts the gun down, and holds her face in both hands.

‘I will _never_ ask you to do anything,’ he says, ‘if you don’t want to kill anyone, I’m not going to make you do it. I just want you to be ready to save your life in case I’m not there.’

‘What?’

‘Keeping you alive will always be my priority,’ he tells her, quietly, like he hopes she doesn’t hear it, even though they’re completely alone. ‘No matter the mission, you’re always going to be my priority.’

She studies his face then, flickers her gaze over his eyes and his hairline and his lips, his pulse jumping in his neck, his eyes again, his mouth again, settling back on his eyes. Hers are red, just a little, like she’s biting back tears.

‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

He could kiss her, he realises. She wouldn’t turn it away, not immediately. But it wouldn’t be fair to do it, so he tells her the safe truth.

‘You’re my partner, it’s my job to keep you safe.’

The air has gone cold and hot and cold again so fast that he feels feverish, but there’s some sort of relief between them at it, and she sighs, nods. He wonders if it’s a sigh of disappointment.

‘Yeah,’ she says, and rubs her face. ‘Yeah, ‘course. It’s my job too. Brains to your brawn, hey.’

He offers her a smile that she returns. ‘Exactly. I need you to read my dossiers for me, who else am I going to get to do it? Me? I don’t think so!’

It gets a laugh, and the air returns to normal, to something they can both be comfortable in.

‘Who, indeed?’

They put their things back, and head back to the elevator.

‘Don’t get your tits out,’ he warns, a playful jab, and she snorts.

‘Don’t challenge me,’ she says, and he shields his eyes. ‘No, but if you want to see the scab, you can, it isn’t anything special.’

‘Maybe after dinner,’ he says, ‘let a man eat first.’

She looks at him, and he looks at her, and he shrugs.

‘Might as well,’ he says, ‘I mean, they want us to play nice, so we might as well. And there’s no rain, so it’ll be a nice walk.’

‘What, and you’ll even walk me home?’ she teases.

‘Maybe,’ he replies, ‘depends on what the dog’s been doing.’

Lucky, as it turns out, has been wreaking havoc in the gardens for most of the day. The greenery is for the agents’ well-being, and the addition of a retriever seems to have gone over well.

‘I don’t often bring him in,’ he admits, as they watch the dog playing fetch through the windows. ‘He’s a good dog, but I don’t want them bringing him in for the K-9 unit, yanno?’

She says she understands, and Clint opens the door.

‘Lucky!’ he calls, ‘here, boy!’

The dog gets hit in the face with the ball he’d been playing with, too distracted by his owner calling him, and he lets out a loud bark and nearly barrels Clint off his feet. Laura is laughing behind him, and Clint wrestles the dog’s tail out of his face.

‘Sit,’ he says, and the dog jumps up to lick his face some more. ‘Lucky, sit. Good boy. Laura, Lucky. Lucky, this is Laura, be nice to her.’

Lucky looks at his owner, looks at Laura, looks at Clint again, and then trots over to Laura and sits at her feet, tail thumping hard at the tiles. Laura bends over to coo and fuss, and her hand cups the dog’s face, studying the scar.

‘One eye?’ she asks.

‘He got hit by a car,’ Clint says, ‘I, uh – haha, it’s not my finest moment. I got into a fight with some Russian gangsters, he was their dog. I took him to the vet and just sort of, adopted him.’

‘No wonder he’s Lucky, then,’ Laura hums, and gives the dog some much-begged for belly rubs. ‘Good boy, Lucky, a handsome man. Is he a support dog?’

 ‘Not officially,’ Clint says, ‘I could never restrict him enough to get the paperwork. But I guess so. He’s been there through some rough times.’

Laura looks at him softly, and he feels himself blushing, so he clears his throat, and calls Lucky back to his heel.

‘He doesn’t need a lead,’ he says, and the dog trots happily at his side as they head for the doors. ‘He doesn’t mind them, but he knows to stay close to me.’

‘That’s great,’ Laura says, and shifts her bag on her shoulder.

‘Arms sore?’ he asks, and Laura groans.

‘Yes.’

He extends a hand, and says, ‘gimme your bag, rest your arms a bit.’

She opens her mouth to protest, but he closes his hands around the straps, and she relinquishes the bag.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘you say you don’t like being taken for a lapdog, and Fury and Carter made you seem like some kind of raving beast, but I don’t see what the problem with you is. No offence, of course, I just mean. You seem perfectly fine.’

‘There’s plenty wrong with me,’ he says, ‘I just – I don’t know. I like you, I guess. Don’t get a big head.’

‘I used to have a big head,’ she says, ‘before I grew into it. I was an ugly child.’

‘I’ll never believe that. I was the ugliest child I’ve ever seen, I’m glad the photos didn’t survive.’

‘Survive?’

‘Parent’s place burnt down,’ he says, in the kind of tone that he hopes tells her not to ask any more questions, because he doesn’t even really want to tell her that.

She doesn’t ask any more questions, and diverts the topic to the kind of missions they might get in the remainder of the week. She’s hoping for something a little longer, a couple days doing investigation and such.

‘I’ve missed big missions,’ she says, ‘I haven’t had any since I came back from Dad’s last month.’

‘I wouldn’t have pegged you for a big mission kind of girl,’ he admits, ‘you seem much more in the day-to-day S.H.I.E.L.D. investigation crowd.’

‘I used to be,’ she says, ‘when I first started out, but getting up to Level Six gave me a chance to actually get involved. As long as I’m not shooting people, I’m alright.’

He nods. ‘You played that heiress very well.’

She smiles. ‘Espionage is what we’re all about, us Sixes. Didn’t you ever do it?’

‘Came in at Seven,’ he shrugs. ‘I had some – uh – notches on my belt by the time Fury picked me up, seemed kind of redundant to put me at grunt level.’

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘you played your bodyguard role well, too, though.’

It’s a needless compliment, but he’s flattered that she’s trying.

‘Stand there looking grumpy and not talking to anyone, sounds like my normal day to me.’

She watches him as they walk, and he tries his best not to look at her.

‘What?’ he asks, when her eyes grow too hot on his ear.

‘Nothing,’ she says, and turns back to the street. ‘Just wondering, is all.’

He grunts, because she might as well have not said anything at all if she’s going to do that, and he gestures her to a turn in the street.

‘I don’t get you,’ she says, and Clint snorts.

‘Good.’

‘No, I mean – the anger. Fury and Carter want me to calm you down, but beyond some perfectly reasonable temper issues, you’re friendly, you’re personable, you’re likeable.’

‘To you, yeah.’

‘Then why not everyone?’ she asks, ‘I don’t get it. Everything is so much easier when you let people in, when you help them and help yourself in the process.’

He finds himself smiling, but it’s not a happy smile. It’s not sad, either, it’s simply there.

‘It’s just one of those things,’ he says, ‘I don’t want people near me, they don’t want to be near me. I kind of want to die, kind of want to just stop existing. Standard shit.’

She stops in the street, and it takes him a few paces to realise it.

‘Then you need a counsellor,’ she says, ‘and not a partner. That’s _depression_ , Clint, and you need professional help, not a pretty girl flashing her tits.’

‘You keep saying that, but you never do it.’

She grabs her blouse, and makes a move like she’s going to rip it open, but then she stops, shakes her head. ‘I wouldn’t, not in the street. Not without some vodka, anyway. But my point stands, Clint.’

He sighs, and approaches her again, standing so close his feet are pressed flush to hers, his hands hanging limp at his sides.

‘Listen,’ he says, quiet, gentle, knows he’s got to be kind about it. ‘Maybe I am depressed. Maybe I’m death-seeking. Maybe I’m just tired of the world and wouldn’t care if I got hit by a car. Maybe I’m just bitter about a bunch of shit I had no control over and will never have answers for. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got a job to do, and I’m going to do it, and no counsellor is going to help with that.’

She stares at him. He stares back.

‘I’m fine,’ he promises, and pats her arms. ‘Honestly. I’m not about to drown myself in the nearest body of water or get deliberately killed on a mission, I’m not that daft.’

Finally, she heaves a sigh, shakes her hair out.

‘I don’t understand you at all,’ she says, exasperated, and throws her hands in the air.

‘That’s how I want it,’ he assures her, and goes for a cheeky grin. He hears his cheeky grins are pretty on the money.

She groans, but continues to follow him down the street to the diner he almost always eats at when he’s not in Vanni’s eatery.

‘Hey,’ she says, halfway through dinner.

He has his feet braced against her chair leg. She has a glass of red wine, and her cheeks are pink in the steam coming off her steak. She’s still got pens in her hair, and they look like any couple off the street, her with her blouse and him with his too-tight t-shirt. There aren’t any other agents in here, which is odd, he tends to see one or two out and about, but he’s grateful for the peace not seeing people he knows brings. There’s a family behind Laura, sitting with her back to the extended view of the street, giving Clint better visibility; the child doesn’t want their milkshake. Lucky sits outside by a fire hydrant, head on his paws, ignoring everybody that comes near him.

‘Hm?’ he asks, because it’s been a few seconds, and he hasn’t reacted, just stared at her like a fool.

‘Thanks.’

‘What for?’

She shrugs, looks at her plate before looking back at him. ‘For opening up to me. For talking and not just, shutting me out, I guess.’

‘I haven’t told you anything that Fury doesn’t know,’ he says, and she gives him a quizzical look. ‘You’re going to report this all back to him, aren’t you?’

She pauses for a second. It’s not a hesitation as she tries to brace herself to lie – she’s a terrible liar by her own admission – but instead, it’s a consideration of her options. She’s thinking over her answer.

‘No,’ she says, after her consideration is over. ‘No, I won’t tell him anything. I mean, he asked me for a general week-by-week report of your “progress,” but he hasn’t asked for anything specific. And unless he does, I won’t tell him.’

He weighs up this disobedience – of course Fury will expect her to report back everything Clint says and does – with the blasé way she cuts a chunk of her steak off and proceeds to down a mouthful of wine at the same time. Uncouth as they come.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I appreciate it.’

She smiles, and finishes chewing.

‘You’re welcome.’

* * *

 

He walks her home, and she asks if he wants to come up for coffee. He looks at her, and if she was anyone else, he thinks he would. But he declines, tells her to be up at six and ready to run, he’ll take her out on his morning route, if she likes.

She would like, and the smile she gives him as she turns to leave keeps his belly burning for the walk to the subway.

* * *

 

Laura is waiting outside her apartment for him when he arrives at six, in S.H.I.E.L.D. issue leggings and tank top. Her trainers are bright orange, and it’s awful, it is.

‘You look like a mess,’ she says, because he does.

He hasn’t given a damn about his hair, and he hasn’t shaved, and his t-shirt has holes in it. His jogging bottoms have dog hair on and his trainers are scuffed, but he doesn’t see the point in wearing god clothes to sweat in.

‘They’re functional,’ he says with a shrug. Lucky’s tail wags hard against his calf. ‘And I don’t run to impress anyone.’

‘Not even me?’ she asks, and he shoves at her, good-natured and soft.

‘Especially not you,’ he says, ‘I don’t care what you think, so long as you can keep up.’

‘I think so,’ she nods, and tightens her ponytail.

She keeps good pace for the first couple of miles, but then she starts to fall back. Lucky drops back to keep her company, because she’s still running, but she’s clearly not used to running at Clint’s pace.

‘Longer legs,’ she pants, and he turns to run backwards to laugh at her.

‘You’re just out of shape,’ he teases, and gestures with his thumb. ‘I’ll meet you at the end point, yeah?’

She waves him off, and then he’s gone, disappearing into the trees of the park.

‘He’s a dummy,’ she tells the dog, and the dog just trots along beside her.

She’s only a few minutes behind him, out of breath and sweaty and he has to remind her to stretch.

‘Don’t just flop on the floor,’ he says, and offers her the water bottle he’d bought during the wait.

‘Eat my shoe,’ she says, and does some stretches before squeezing the water in his face.

* * *

 

He walks her home again, buys her a banana from the market, and she pauses at the door.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘you should keep some clothes at my apartment.’

He raises an eyebrow, and studies her. She seems entirely serious, and in only a few skipped beats of his heart, he sees the logic.

‘I mean,’ she continues, and fiddles with her ponytail. ‘It’d save you going back and forth across the subway, right? You look in Brooklyn, so it’s a lot of hassle.’

‘I don’t mind it,’ he says, ‘but yeah, that would make sense, if you wanted to go running again.’

She laughs, and he smiles, and she tells him not to press his luck.

He packs a bag with a spare uniform, underwear, a set of street clothes, some more socks for good luck, and one of Lucky’s toys, and doesn’t really think about it.

* * *

 

Coulson returns from Atlanta and comes to find Clint, pretending to sleep on the roof of one of the SUVs.

‘I hear I’ve been supplanted,’ Coulson says.

‘She’s a lot easier on the eyes,’ Clint replies, and turns his head to see Coulson stood next to the SUV, his arms folded, looking exactly the same as he always does. ‘Save it.’

‘You have a mission coming up,’ Coulson says, with that soft frown he has when he thinks Clint’s going to give him shit, ‘Level Seven, Fury wants to know if she’s safe with you.’

‘What kind of question is that? Of course she is.’

‘You know what he means.’

Clint flips down from the SUV. ‘No, Coulson, I don’t know what he means. Does he think I’m going to hurt her? Does he think I’m going to kill her and pretend it was enemy fire? Does he think I’m going to go AWOL? I’m flattered he thinks so highly of me.’

 Coulson does not bite, because Coulson has never bit.

‘He wants to be sure that if he sends the pair of you into the depths of a Level Seven kill order, that she’s going to be alright. You’re safe, we know you’re safe, and we know you’d never hurt her. But she _isn’t_ Level Seven.’

‘She doesn’t need to know,’ Clint tells him, serious. ‘And she doesn’t want to. She’s happy at Level Six, I can go without her. Or she can stay here and support over the comms.’

‘Fury wants her on the field. There’s some information gathering needed, too. Level Six clearance, but intensive.’

Clint curls his lip. Information gathering is the worst.

‘I hate escort missions,’ he tells his handler, like Coulson doesn’t know that Clint would cut his fingers off before he willingly escorted nerds around.

‘Can she handle herself?’

‘Yes.’

Coulson nods. ‘Then you’d better get prepared, you’ll be flying out in the morning.’

He turns to leave, and Clint stares at the back of his head.

‘What, not even going to say you missed me?’

‘I’ve been supplanted,’ Coulson tells him, looking back over his shoulder with a raised brow. ‘You don’t need me to miss you.’

No, Clint supposes, heaving a sigh. But it would have been nice.

* * *

 

Laura has not spent much time with Clint yet, not really. They’ve been close the last few days, of course, but they’ve gone home at the end of the day, and she’s had the ladies’ to hide in if things have gotten a little tense. And Clint knows that this, this Level Seven operation, these observations and the information and the eventual murder he’s been hired to commit –

This is something different.

‘You wanted a longer mission,’ he teases, as she comes through the door, in uniform and her hair pinned up, her shoulders back.

She looks good, and it’s a shame really.

‘I did,’ she agrees, and moves her chair slightly closer to his. He’s already examined his dossier for key words.

He has a different one to her, and she doesn’t miss it, hesitates before picking hers up.

‘How different are these ops?’ she asks.

‘Different enough,’ Fury says, sitting at his desk and looking for all the world like he hasn’t listened to Clint run his mouth for the last five minutes about how unfortunate it is that Laura is so nice.

She looks at Clint. He doesn’t look at her.

‘Oh,’ she says, and opens her dossier finally. ‘That kind of different.’

‘You’re going in armed,’ Clint says, ‘I’ll stay with you as much as I can, of course. But you’ll be alone for a time.’

‘She’s a qualified agent, Barton,’ Fury says, ‘she knows what to do.’

Laura nods, and sits straighter, eyes still on the dossier.

‘I do,’ she says. ‘This doesn’t seem hard, I’ll be fine. It’s you I’m worried about.’

She looks across at him, and Clint shakes his head.

‘This is nothing,’ he promises. ‘I’ll be in and out before you’ve even logged on.’

She takes a breath, not quite a sigh, but deep enough that he know she doesn’t buy it.

‘Okay,’ she says, and turns back to her dossier. ‘I understand.’

She sits quietly, one hand under her chin, as Fury fills them in on the rest of the information they need. It’s just going to be the three of them, Clint, Laura, and Coulson, and their support will be run from HQ. It should just be a simple in and out, standard domestic insurgency and terrorism and all that, but there have been talks of experiments, talks of weaponry. Clint listens with one ear, watches her with both eyes. Her posture is different, her attitude, her expression. Being split from Clint on the mission has put her on a back foot she hadn’t realised she had; it had been coming, of course, and she was ready for it, but he doesn’t think she’d expected their second mission together to be like this. She wanted longer missions that would give her some more bonding time, something way below their pay grades to just play around with.

But Fury doesn’t play, and he never has. He has some ulterior motive for having Laura be his partner, and Clint doesn’t like that there’s nothing he can pick up, no context clues, no situational awareness, no logical path. He’s in the dark about the Director’s decision, and he hates it.

‘It’ll be a long flight,’ Coulson says, after Fury’s finished talking. ‘You’ll be alright?’

‘Yes,’ Laura nods, ‘I’ll be fine. I didn’t think we were going out-of-state until next week.’

‘Circumstance dictates,’ Fury says, with an incline of his head, ‘and don’t worry, you’ll have a chance to buy a new dress. I understand that your Macy’s bargain is unrepairable.’

‘It’s not unrepairable,’ Laura hedges, ‘it just won’t look the same. I put the seamstress bill down as an expense.’

Fury almost smiles. Clint bites the inside of his lip to stop himself from laughing.

‘You can put the new dress under expenses,’ Fury says, ‘there’s budget enough.’

She nods. ‘I’m not sure I want to buy a fancy one if I’m going anywhere with him.’

‘I’m offended. But you’ll have to,’ Clint tells her. ‘A charity gala is no place to go in a cheap piece of polyester from JCPenney.’

‘Because you’d know about charity galas and polyester,’ Coulson snorts, and Clint gives him a withering look.

But Laura bites, and it eases some tension from Clint’s shoulders. They’ll talk about Clint’s less classified stories for the entire flight, which is fine. He’ll fly them out, and he’ll do his thing. Coulson will do what Coulson always does, and Laura will surprise herself with her capability.

As they’re dismissed and walk towards the hangar, Clint drops back to tail them, watching the way Laura and Coulson banter, the way Laura moves her hands to talk, the slight bob of her hair, the measured stride and the swing of her hips. Her uniform is perfectly tailored, looking fairly new. She’d said she didn’t go on field missions much, so she must not wear it, but the jumpsuit is a good look for her.

He prefers her hair down, though; she’s been wearing it in curls since he mentioned it that first day.

* * *

 

Coulson flies them out, refusing to let Clint pilot, even though he’s better.

‘Just sit there and play nice,’ he says, and Laura, pouring over her dossier with a pen cap in her mouth, tells him that Clint doesn’t know how.

So Clint sits next to her and jostles her arm for ten minutes until she stamps on his foot.

‘I don’t like it,’ she says after a couple of hours.

Clint doesn’t meditate, but he’d been sitting silently next to her, eyes shut, paying attention to the scratch of her pen on the paper, her breath coming and going slow and steady. He’d listen to the beat of her heart if he could hear it, but all he can hear is the softness of her existence.

‘Don’t like what?’

It had been a whisper, so he whispers it back.

‘You having a separate mission. I mean, I get it. And I’m fine with it. But I didn’t want you – doing your thing. Quite so early.’

He shrugs. ‘Fury’s up to something. Just don’t get yourself killed.’

She shakes her head. ‘My dossier says that there shouldn’t be any trouble unless I’m discovered, and I’m very good at sneaking.’

She’s tripped over cracked pavement and had sneezes come out of absolutely nowhere, so he doesn’t think sneaking is going to be the problem.

‘Stay safe,’ he tells her, and takes her hand. ‘Please.’

‘I’m more worried about you,’ she whispers, and turns her hand to squeeze back. ‘You’re the one on the assassination run.’

He doesn’t reply; there’s nothing he can say to content her.

‘At least we get a couple of days to prepare,’ she says, as brightly as she can manage. The worry of what they have to do will not be so easily shifted. ‘You’ll have to help me pick out a new dress; I might get a purple one, if there’s one out there.’

‘A purple one?’ he hums. ‘I’ll definitely have to come with you if that’s the case.’

‘If you’re going to join the mile-high club, you only have a few minutes to get started,’ Coulson calls from the cockpit.

Clint calls him some very rude names indeed, and Laura hides her snickers behind her hand.

They land without incident – mile-high or otherwise – and disembark atop the safehouse’s roof.

‘Welcome to base,’ Coulson says, and moves the plant pot behind the TV satellite to get the key.

One problem becomes immediately apparent.

There are only two bedrooms, and only one double bed in each room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- i love the sharing a bed trope and i will have it put on my gravestone when i die  
> \- clint please stop yo-yoing your emotions you dramatic loser  
> \- laura do not flash your tits in an elevator there are better uses of time  
> \- i am enjoying everything too much lol


	3. Bedmates and Gala Dates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sharing a bed is less of a problem than a communication failure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> how am i writing so much so fast what is this, 2015? anyway this is great fun i love everything
> 
> enjoy my lovelies!

Clint ends up bunking with Laura. It wasn’t his idea, and he protested to the very last second. Coulson had laughed his ass off the entire time, because seeing Clint get read the riot act was one of those rare moments that he should savour but was enjoying too much. Laura was having none of his protests, and was having none of Coulson laughing, because it was only going to encourage Clint to protest, and really they all ought to get out of her face.

‘And into your bed?’ Coulson asks, and if Laura hadn’t been between them, Clint thinks he might have actually physically murdered his handler, as useful an ally as he was.

Just straight up kill him, end everyone’s suffering.

‘I deserve better than this,’ Clint says.

Laura tells him to stop pouting.

‘Let me sleep on the couch,’ he says.

‘Oh, grow a pair,’ she replies, and continues with her nightly face-care regime.

Clint is sitting on the bed, trying his best to sulk. It isn’t going very well. Laura has been ignoring his attempts to sulk the way Clint ignores Lucky’s attempts to sulk when he’s been denied treats.

‘Shut up,’ she tells him, and he makes a noise in the back of his throat.

‘I didn’t say a word!’

‘You didn’t have to; I can hear the ruminating from here.’

Clint doesn’t have the heart to tell her he doesn’t know what ruminating means.

‘I don’t have any germs,’ Laura tells him, ‘and I certainly don’t have cooties, you’ll be fine. You’ve shared a bed before, haven’t you?’

He stares at the back of her head. ‘No,’ he says, because he hasn’t. ‘Whenever we’ve done an overnight mission, I’ve slept on the couch.’

‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ she tells him, and turns away from the mirror. ‘You might as well just not sleep at all. Honestly, I’ve shared a bed with all of my partners on missions, it’s just not worth the bad back.’

Clint is not a jealous man. But he’s jealous in some unspeakable way, something he can’t put his fingers on, even though he wants very much to tell her what he thinks of this all.

 It had been a long afternoon; they’d arrived in decent time, but they’d have to wait until morning to make the most use of the town. For the time they had, they bought groceries (Coulson), scouted out locations with good viewpoints (Clint), and set up the communications link with HQ (Laura). And it had been fine until they’d reconvened at base, and then the squabbling over sleeping arrangements had begun, and then Laura had gone for a shower and taken too long so Clint had to piss in the flowerbed, and all around, things had been soured.

‘Just get into bed, you incredible sulk,’ she says, and Clint purses his lips at her, but does as he’s told, and squeezes himself into the thinnest possible space at the edge of the bed.

Laura rolls her eyes, and makes herself comfortable on the other side of the bed, tucking the duvet around her shoulders, and wriggling until her legs and arms are comfortably situated.

‘Goodnight,’ she says, quiet, and Clint lies there staring at the wall until he hears her breathing evening out.

He can’t remember the last time he slept on a mission with someone else in the same room. It’s not that he doesn’t trust anyone, he just –

Doesn’t trust anyone.

Laura is nice, and she’s asleep – from the sounds of it, her mouth is open – and she’s so lax behind him that he can feel the dip in the mattress from the looseness of her limbs. But she’s still an agent, and Fury is still up to something.

‘Don’t be a dummy,’ he whispers to himself, and swings up and out of bed. ‘She isn’t going to kill you.’

Coulson is snoring across the hall when he pauses at the door, listening to the small world around him.

‘Get back into bed,’ Laura murmurs from behind him, and he turns back.

There’s a gap in the curtains; her hair is silver in the streetlights filtering through, haloed around her head, her hand outstretched towards him and her sleepy face is resting in a smile, lidded eyes watching him. She’s so fucking beautiful, and he aches, heavy and too warm.

‘Early start tomorrow,’ she adds, and when he doesn’t reply, she drops her outstretched hand to her eyes, rubbing them as she sits up. ‘You okay? What time is it, did you have a bad dream?’

‘You’ve only been asleep about an hour,’ he says, staying by the door. ‘But no, no I’m fine. Go back to sleep.’

‘You getting water?’ she asks, and she twists her hair up off her neck into a loose bun atop her head. ‘I’ll make you cocoa, there was some in the cupboard, I think.’

‘I’m fine,’ he snaps, and then pauses.

Coulson continues to snore. Laura stares at him, and then swings out of bed.

‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ she tells him, and holds up a stopping hand, her nose wrinkled. ‘Go to bed, Clint, I’ll sleep on the couch.’

They come to an impasse; Clint will not move, and refuses to move. Laura refuses to get back into bed, and seems determined to wait him out. They stare at each other. He half expects her to punch him in the face. He’d have punched himself in the face.

 Finally, he shakes his head. ‘Go back to bed,’ he tells her.

Laura, for her part, stands there with her hands on her hips in utter disbelief at this _child_.

‘No,’ she says, ‘either you go to bed, or I’m staying awake. It’s not difficult, Clint, we’re grown adults, and I, for one, am _tired_. I would like to sleep, but I won’t if I'm worrying about you.’

‘Don’t worry about me then,’ he shrugs, and she drops her jaw. ‘It’s not like I’m worth the worry, so save it for something that matters.’

She’s flabbergasted. ‘And how about I just cut my heart out while I’m at it?’ she snipes, ‘you don’t get to tell me what’s worth my worry, so shut your cakehole and get back into bed and go to sleep, or I’ll put insubordination on my report for Fury.’

She even points at the bed, because she doesn’t know what else to do. She didn’t expect this kind of resistance from him, and she doesn’t understand where it’s coming from. Sharing a bed is logical to her. Sleeping is logical to her – desirable, even.

‘Laura,’ he starts, but she just waves a dismissive hand at him.

‘If the next words out of your mouth aren’t about you going to bed, I don’t want to hear them.’

Coulson has stopped snoring; their volume has been climbing, but they’re too engrossed in this pointless squabble for the sake of squabbling that they haven’t noticed.

‘I don’t sleep with other people,’ he says, ‘I never have.’

‘I’m not other people,’ she says, and it’s gentler, softer.

She doesn’t know enough about him yet, not really, but she knows enough. She can fill in enough blanks to know he’s – not scared. But he doesn’t let his guard down.

‘No,’ he agrees, and the hard lines of him in the shadows of the night soften, sadden. ‘No, you’re not other people.’

She’s just her, just Laura, and he likes her, he does. He should be able to trust her.

Somehow, she convinces him to get into bed, and somehow, she deems draping herself over him is a perfectly acceptable way of convincing him to stay. He stares very pointedly at the ceiling as she settles her arm across his chest and her leg across his thighs, her head on his shoulder. It’s too comfortable, especially after she grabs his hand and drags it around to rest on her hip.

‘There,’ she murmurs, her breath hot on his chest. ‘Better?’

He grunts, because he doesn’t trust himself to reply, can’t think of anything to say that isn’t rude.

‘Better,’ she nods. ‘Goodnight, Clint. Sleep well.’

He feels her drift off this time, feels her body go limp. It would be easy to kill her. He could easily do it. He doesn’t understand how she does it.

He feels her heart beat against his ribs, her breath fan across his chest, glad he’d worn a T-shirt. Her hair smells like honey, and he continues to stare at the ceiling, thinking about all the things he has to do, all the things he needs to not think about. His belly is tight, and he feels, in a way he cannot quite express, exposed.

So he carefully detangles them, rolls her over to lie curled up on her side, close enough that he can see the rise and fall of her shoulder, but not so close he can feel it, and then he curls up on _his_ side, so that the breadth of his shoulders protect her from the window. He’s exposed in an entirely different way, but he can deal with it better like this. He isn’t pinned, held down, restrained. He’s free to move.

He watches her eyes flicker in sleep, looks at her delicate cheekbones, her fine brow, loose hair falling against her neck. He watches her until his eyes grow heavy, and then he stops watching her, and starts breathing.

* * *

 

Laura wakes up alone, Clint’s side of the bed left a mess. His clothes are gone, his handgun, left on the side, is also gone. His bag is still there, so he hasn’t fled. She stares at the sun coming through the blinds, and then rolls over. It’s nine am, long past her usual wake up time.

She curses, fantastically, and throws herself out of bed and into the hallway. The safehouse is all on one level, so she can see Coulson in the kitchen before she’s even near it, and he looks up from the frying pan when he sees her.

‘There you are,’ he says, ‘I made breakfast, I was about to come and get you up.’

She rubs her face, takes a second to readjust, and then nods. ‘Yeah, yeah, I – I didn’t realise I’d slept so late.’

‘Late one, was it?’ Coulson asks, and Laura looks at him. ‘I heard you and Clint arguing, figured it went on late into the night.’

She continues to look at him and tries to decide if he’s implying what she thinks he’s implying.

‘He has some trust issues,’ she shrugs, and takes a seat in the breakfast nook.

‘You don’t have to explain it,’ he says, ‘I’ve been handling him for two years, and he’s always been like that.’

Laura takes the coffee he offers her, and thanks him for the plate he puts in front of her, before sitting down with his own. ‘Where is he?’

Coulson shrugs. ‘He was gone when I got up at six, figured he’s gone on his scouting tour. He’ll be back later.’

Laura tries not to feel disappointed. He’d said he’d come with her to help her pick out a dress, but he’ll be gone for as long as possible. She pokes at the bacon on her plate, and then carefully lifts it on the fork onto Coulson’s, followed quickly by the sausage.

‘No bacon,’ she says, when he cocks his head at her.

‘Pork?’ he asks, and she shakes her head. ‘Duly noted.’

She eats the rest of her breakfast in ravenous peace, not aware of how hungry she’d actually been, and then she picks up her dossier again.

‘Is this what it’s always like?’ she asks, absently, coffee in one hand, paperwork in the other, in an over-sized vest and her knickers, because she didn’t pack actual pyjamas but she did pack bedsocks, her hair in a sleep-mussed bun, her eyes sore.

Somehow, it feels entirely natural to be sat her with Coulson like this, in his suit and his hair combed. She hasn’t even brushed her teeth, but he’s ready for the day and was just waiting on her. He’s amiable, smiling and treating her like an equal, even though he knows more secrets than her and Clint combined. He probably knows what Fury’s planning.

‘Is this what what’s like?’

‘Clint,’ she says, ‘missions. I know he’s not going to get into trouble, but I’m already sick with worry.’

 ‘Never assume he’s not going to get into trouble,’ Coulson says, ‘he’ll find a way, even if there isn’t a way to be had.’

‘Oh,’ she says, and finishes her last mouthful. ‘I’ll get ready and then I’ll head out, start investigating where I can. I’ll – I’ll pick up a dress, too.’

Coulson nods, because he has his own things to do, and he’s already delayed waiting for her. She feels guilty, staring at herself in the mirror as she scrubs her teeth, for sleeping so late, but it had been the best night’s sleep she’d had in a long, long time, and she hadn’t realised she needed someone beside her to get that kind of sleep. Her apartment was lonely, empty and rattling and cold, but having Clint beside her in bed, the little bit of cuddling they’d had, which sure, she’d forced on him, but they’d had anyway, that had been – perfect.

She spits and rinses, and puts it to the back of her mind. She’s got a job to do, and she’s already started on a poor showing.

* * *

 

She’s searching the rails in a little boutique off the high street when the bell for the door behind her rattles. She glances in the shoe mirror at the bottom of the rail, but she can’t see anything, and she pretends to be engrossed in the label for an awful black dress made of the worst taffeta. And they call this a boutique.

‘Hello, sir,’ starts the sales girl, and then she takes a breath. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Fine,’ Clint says, ‘just come to make sure my fiance’s alright.’

‘Your fia – oh, right, okay. Well, um. Let me know if you need anything!’

Laura turns just as Clint smiles and gives the girl a thumbs up, and if she was a lesser being, Laura would have screamed until she was hoarse. As it is, she lets out an exasperated groan.

‘What did you _do_?’ she demands, and rifles in her bag for a tissue. ‘You sneak out this morning and now here you are, covered in – how did you know where I was?’

Clint takes the proffered tissue and dabs at his nosebleed. ‘Never lost you,’ he says, with a shrug. ‘Been following you all morning. You do good investigating, when you’re not paying attention.’

She stares at him. He shoves the tissue up his nose and wriggles it before swiping at his nose with a clean corner of the tissue and giving up altogether.

‘I’ll take it as a compliment,’ she says, dubious at best and outright done at worst.

He offers her a smile. It’d be charming if he didn’t have blood in his gums.

‘What dresses have you found? I haven’t been in any of the shops, this is the first break I’ve had.’

‘I’m sure you’ve had plenty,’ she snorts, and he elbows her in the arm. ‘None, so far. Nothing says charity gala on the Director’s budget so far.’

‘Fuck his budget,’ Clint tells her, and when he reaches out to rifle through the rail, his knuckles are scabby and covered in grit. ‘Get whatever you want.’

‘Because I’m going to spend thousands on a dress to wear once,’ she says.

‘Why not?’ he asks, ‘if I was able to buy something with no object of money, I’d buy the most expensive thing I could.’

She wonders if he’s ever owned anything expensive.

She watches him from the corner of her eye as he continues to look through the rail.

‘Here,’ he says, ‘it’s not purple, but I think you’d look good in it.’

It’s some slinky black thing with a thigh-high slit and a Bardot neckline in white.

‘It’s something,’ she says, and he waves it at her.

‘Try it on, you don’t have to get it.’

She checks the size – hers, naturally – and heaves a sigh that sounds like she’s rolling her eyes before going to the changing room. The sales girl gives her a worried look, her chin angling towards Clint in a very subtle gesture she almost misses. A subtle shake of her head in return – he’s fine, truly – and she’s disappearing inside the changing room, struggling out of her jeans and t-shirt to get into the dress. It’s nice, certainly, but it’s not her. She redoes her messy bun, and she steps out of the changing room to find Clint sitting on the edge of the shoe display stand, because of course he is.

He looks a sight, tank top and Timberlands and black jeans, with blood on his face and his arms folded in a way that makes his arms look bigger than they are, and he straightens a little when she wiggles out of the changing room to see him there. He’s let his hair start growing too, just a little bit, and he has the shadow of blond behind his ears where the crew cut is fading.

‘You look lovely,’ he tells her, and stands up to get a better look. He has another couple of dresses over his arm.

She feels incredibly small, even though she’s been in heeled boots all morning, and she feels like she’s under intense scrutiny.

‘It’s not right,’ he says, after doing a circle around her like a vulture. ‘It’s nice, but you aren’t comfortable.’

‘I’m not comfortable being eyed like a target,’ she says, and he draws back a little, startled.

‘Is that what you think?’ he asks. He’s serious, so she nods, and then shakes her head.

‘No, not really. It’s just very intense.’

‘I want you to do well,’ he says, and begins shepherding her back to the changing room.

His hand does not need to be that low on her back, but she isn’t going to argue with him too much, because his hand is very warm, and it leaves a pleasant tingle along her spine.

‘Um, sir,’ the sales girl says.

‘Just hanging the dresses up,’ he says, cheerfully, ‘she’ll trip over them, and I don’t have the car to take her to the emergency room.’

He shuts Laura behind the curtain as he’s talking, and he keeps the sales girl up in a polite banter, all niceties and idle gossip about the town. Laura listens to it as she wriggles into the next dress, which makes her look yellow and drained, and she gets one step out of the changing room before both Clint and the sales girl, who are standing together and still bantering, both pull a face and shake their heads.

‘Awful,’ the sales girl says, even though it’s one of the most expensive dresses in the shop. ‘Not for you.’

‘Dreadful,’ Clint agrees. ‘I knew it would be, but I wanted to get perspective.’

The second dress he has for her is the one. Laura knows it’s the one before she’s even got it one properly. Floor-length, even when she’s on tip-toes, in a perfectly matte black, with a deep V at the back, ending in a knot, cut high across her décolletage, and even with her favourite, most well-worn bra on show, it’s perfect.

She swishes out, the dress one of those that you have to swish in, and the sales girl gasps and sighs and puts a hand on her chest, and Clint just stands there, mouth open mid-word, and his eyes so wide and so blue.

‘Fuck,’ he breathes, and shoves his hands in his pockets. ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’

‘I think so!’ the sales girl agrees, and rushes over to adjust the dress against Laura’s shoulders. ‘It doesn’t even need altering! Your man’s got a good eye, he couldn’t have picked a better fit if he’d had it tailored!’

Laura flushes at the epithet. Clint isn’t her man, and even though he’d introduced himself that way, it still burns in her spine where he touched her.

‘Yeah, he’s good like that,’ she replies.

Clint is still staring at her.

‘Fit for a gala?’ she asks, and he snorts.

‘Fit for my floor,’ he says, and the sales girl titters, and ushers Laura back into the changing room.

Back in her double denim and her boots, Laura feels much more comfortable, and only winces a little bit at the price label. Clint elbows her as he puts it on his card – one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. issue credit cards, she knows, for expenses and such – because this is a business thing. The price doesn’t matter, and if she does her job right, she’ll be able to keep it for another event.

Packed in a posh paper bag in a box, they leave the shop and go straight to the nearest burger joint for lunch.

‘I’m not fancy at all,’ Laura says, and Clint gestures at the faded white of her tank-top.

‘I can see that.’

She throws a fry at him. He catches it and shoves it in his mouth.

After they’ve eaten and Laura’s finished slurping her milkshake too loudly, they part ways and return to work. Laura looks at the rooftops any time she’s outside or sat near a window, and tries to spot him, but can’t see hide nor hair of him.

She pretends like she doesn’t miss him, like she didn’t want to catch him, and goes about getting the last of her information before heading back to the safehouse to relay it.

Coulson is cooking dinner, something with noodles and chicken and spices.

‘You bought a dress, then?’ he asks, gesturing at the bag.

‘Yeah,’ she says, and hopes she isn’t blushing as bright as her cheeks feel. ‘Clint – he tailed me, I think? He said he hadn’t lost me all day, came to the boutique I was in, he’d been in a fight.’

‘He’s always in a fight,’ Coulson assures her, ‘you get used to it. But he’ll do that, follow you, I mean. You’d best get used to it.’

Laura sits at the breakfast nook and rests her chin on her hands. ‘It’s not that I don’t like it. I just – ‘

‘You don’t like that he’s got that much of an edge on you,’ Coulson nods. ‘You’d best leave him to it, he’s.’ He waves a hand. ‘Marking his territory, I guess.’

Laura snorts. ‘Marking his territory, sure.’

She puts the dress away and is helping Coulson finish up dinner when Clint appears from the bathroom.

‘There is a door, you know,’ Coulson says without looking up from the instructions on the sauce.

Clint shrugs; his nosebleed has gotten worse, and the blood is smeared over his cheek. Laura drops her cloth and rushes to him, grabbing his face in both hands.

‘What did you _do_?’ she demands, ‘I can’t let you out of my sight, ugh, come here, let me get that cleaned up, you’re not hurt anywhere else, are you?’

Clint is flushed beneath the blood, and flushes deeper when Laura shoves him onto the edge of the bathtub and stands between his knees to get at his face.

‘I’m fine,’ he assures her.

‘Oh, shut up,’ she snaps, and holds his chin tight in one hand, dabbing the blood off his face with a wet cloth in the other. ‘Honestly, you’re going to be black and blue in the morning, and you’re going to snore all night, I can’t _believe_ you.’

‘You get used to it!’ Coulson calls from the kitchen, ‘just get him to wash his hands, dinner’s on the table.’

Laura looks to the kitchen, and then back to Clint, studying him.

‘You’re alright?’ she asks, quiet.

He nods, stubble rasping against her palms. ‘I’m fine. Just a couple thugs, nothing I can’t handle in my sleep.’

She watches him for a second more and then kisses his nose, backs away to go to the kitchen.

‘Make sure you wash your hands,’ she says over her shoulder.

He scrubs them up to the elbows, and they’re still pink when he joins her at the table, resting his foot on the bar of her stool.

* * *

 

He doesn’t protest the sleeping arrangement tonight, just gets into bed while she’s doing her routine and holds out an arm.

‘Hurry up,’ he says, when she takes exactly two seconds too long. ‘My arm’s tired.’

‘Then put it to sleep,’ she tells him, and smiles at him in the mirror before finishing dabbing cream into her eyelid and she slips into bed next to him.

They wriggle to get themselves situated, and he feels too warm immediately, her leg cocked a little higher around his hips, her forehead against his chin.

‘You’re warm,’ she tells him, ‘it’ll be nice on missions in the winter.’

‘I’ll get Fury to send us to Siberia,’ he tells her, and she shivers.

‘No. Norway would be bad enough.’

‘Norway?’

‘I hear it’s cold in winter.’

Well, she’s not wrong, but the logic is – Clint thinks he likes her too much.

Laura shifts her hips and gets comfortable and her breathing deepens.

‘Sleep well,’ she whispers, and he squeezes her hip.

‘You too, honey.’

She’s gone in only a few minutes, and doesn’t protest when he rolls her over. He puts his back to the window again, shadows her from the light in the gap of the curtains, and watches her sleep.

* * *

 

He wakes at one point in the night to find his face full of her hair, tied up in a bun again, his leg wrapped around both of hers, his arm holding her close. She’s breathing deep enough to be snoring, a little bit, and it takes him a few slow, half-asleep minutes to realise that he’s –

In a predicament.

But Clint is a grown man, and he chooses to ignore it. He buries his face in the back of her neck and goes back to sleep.

She’s gone when he wakes up again.

* * *

 

‘That quartet is out of time,’ Clint murmurs, and he hears Laura hum.

He’s sitting in the shadows of a fire escape, watching through the windows opposite at the scene of the gala going on, completely unawares. Laura is walking and talking, looking elegant and too beautiful, her hair in casual curls, all pinned to the side of her head, hiding the earpiece. There’s a glass of champagne in her hand, a clutch tucked under her arm, and she uses the other hand, free of anything, to touch the arms of over-generous men and middle-aged ladies of not inconsiderable wealth.

There’s a sniper rifle next to him, but his fingers are working the shaft of an arrow, rolling it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. An arrow is a little more – identifiable. But Coulson should be able to retrieve it before anyone notices, if he ever shows his face.

‘Where are you?’ Clint asks, and Coulson hums.

A moment passes, and then, ‘isn’t a man allowed to urinate?’

Laura snorts, and Clint watches her cover her mouth, as though she’s clearing her throat. She turns at someone approaching her, and she smiles, all open touches of the man’s arm, laughing at things he’s saying, and talking to him as though she isn’t a spy.

‘You’re very good,’ he tells her, and Laura extends her middle finger, elegantly, around her champagne glass. She doesn’t know where he is, but knows he can see her. ‘That isn’t very nice.’

The man walks away. Laura fiddles with her hair, and she says, ‘I’m not a very nice girl, Mister Barton.’

He squints at her, and she goes back to swishing about, mingling and laughing and gathering even more information. She really is very good at this.

Clint stays sat by the fire escape, waiting for his opening. She needs to be out of the room, for a start. But she needs an opening to leave.

Hours pass. There’s a speech about the efforts the charity is making. Laura clears her throat in an unconvinced sort of way; her investigations in the town have given her enough to know that it’s all a front. She just needs the confirmation from the intel she’s there to get.

They move to sit down for dinner, and Clint moves to get a view of the dining room, two rooftops over. He leaves the sniper rifle behind, but takes his bow with him. A man talking to Laura gets interrupted; she says she’s just going to the bathroom, but she’ll join him afterwards. Coulson slips into the gap she leaves, begins talking to the man about one of the cars he saw in the underground garage.

The man is very proud of his car, and only looks back to where Laura had disappeared once.

Coulson moves around the table to be next to the man Clint is about to kill. They’ve done this enough times to have the routine ready.

There’s another speech; Coulson straightens his shoulders, Clint draws the bow.

His opening comes in five, four, three –

And then Laura’s feed cuts out. The complete absence of her audio startles him.

‘Where is she? Clint demands.

Coulson coughs, looks over his shoulder, a warning. He says something about how the weather is looking lovely for the time of year. He just flew over from Rhode Island, he says, and they’ve had some terrible storms.

‘Tell me where she is,’ Clint says, and Coulson ignores him.

He’s lost his opening. The mission is compromised. Clint keeps the arrow aimed, but his eyes are scouring all the windows. There is no sign of Laura.

Coulson stares resolutely at nothing as the waiters bring out the dinner. His fingers tap against his cheek, picking up in his headset. Clint’s never really understood how he gets away with it, pretending that he’s deaf in one ear or whatever, but if it works, he’s not going to question it. Soon, Clint hopes, the lab rats will develop a better earpiece that doesn’t need explanation because it’s not going to so easily visible. But that’ll be a way off yet, he supposes.

The bastard keeps tapping.

Morse code.

_T-A-K-E-T-H-E-S-H-O-T_

‘Not until she’s safe,’ Clint growls, and shifts his knees. If he has to, he will fucking swing in there with a grappling arrow and he will fucking find her himself, mission be damned.

_N-O-W-T-H-A-T-I-S-A-N-O-R-D-E-R_

Clint breathes through his nose, loosens the draw and then tightens it. He’ll have to take the shot, they can’t miss this mark, it’ll compromise a year’s worth of agents’ investigation, and it’ll be years before the bastard is out in the open again.

He mutters, ‘please be safe,’ under his breath several times before he lets the arrow fly. It hits the window, and as soon as it meets it’s mark – the back of the bastard’s neck – he’s moving, back over the rooftops and collapsing his bow, snatching up the rifle. The sight doesn’t offer him anything he can’t see with the naked eye; no sight of Laura.

‘Laura,’ he barks, ‘where the fuck are you?’

Seconds pass, and he’s moving still, working his way around the building, ignoring the screaming and commotion on Coulson’s end, listening out for her. There is no quartet playing now, and he collapses the sniper down, shoves it in the hooks on the back of his gear, draws his bow again. He’ll grapple over there, and he’ll find her.

And then, like a breath of air after being submerged, Laura’s audio crackles back into life.

‘What the _fuck_?’ he hisses.

Laura is in the emergency stairwell, her shoes in hand, holding her dress up by her knees, and she’s making her way very, very quietly down the stairs.

‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ she says.

‘You disappeared,’ Clint snarls, and makes his way down the fire escape, determined to meet her at the exit. Coulson will catch them up, he always catches them up.

‘I was in a sealed room,’ she tells him, panting a little. ‘You disappeared too.’

‘Warn me next time!’

She barks out a laugh. ‘Maybe use some logic next time! If I was in trouble, do you not think I’d have let you know?’

‘I was worried you’d been compromised!’

‘If I was, I handled it,’ she tells him, and it’s the wrong thing to say.

‘You were compromised?’

He leaps off the last three flights of the fire escape, hits the opposite wall and springs back to the ground, rolling back to his feet and rushing across the alley to wrench the fire escape open. Laura is on the other side, looking surprised that he’s that close.

‘I handled it,’ she says, and he shakes his head, grabs her face to look at her. ‘Get off, I’m fine. It was nothing I can’t handle. The security guard will wake up in an hour or two, he’ll be fine.’

He stares at her. She stares back.

‘Never do that again,’ he says, and she snorts, shakes him off to pad down the street.

‘I’ll do what I like. Let’s get back to the safehouse before they realise I’m gone.’

‘Oh, leave me behind, I see,’ Coulson says, jovial, and Clint tells him to make his own way home.

They get a pizza on the way, and the spotty teenager on the counter gives them a very confused look. Laura is dressed to the nines. Clint is in tactical gear.

 He weighs up his options, and decides he is not paid enough to ask questions. They get their pizza, and go on their way.

Laura’s feet are scuffed and bleeding by the time they get back, so Clint grabs her behind the thighs and hikes her up over his shoulder. She eats a slice of pizza, and twists enough to let him have a bite.

‘Watch your head,’ he says, and she ducks to get through the door. ‘And down we go.’

He deposits her on the couch and takes the slice of pizza she offers, dropping down next to her.

‘You get the intel?’ he asks, and she pats her clutch.

‘Yep. Just gotta send it back to base.’ She shoves the last of the crust of her slice into her mouth, and gets to her feet. ‘I’ll do it now.’

As she goes, she shrugs the dress off her shoulders and steps out of it, disappearing into the bedroom before returning in the vest she’d slept in. Clint is still transfixed on the sight of her back, the skin so evenly toned he knows she tanned naked, and has half-chewed pizza in his mouth. She pads into the office space, and he hears the beeping and booping of technology, the rattle of the computer as she sends off the intel.

When she returns, she looks tired, beneath the expensive makeup, her hair taken from its pins and twisted into its standard messy bun.

She’d be more beautiful without the makeup, he thinks, but can’t bring himself to say.

 So he shoves another slice of pizza into his mouth, and tells her he’s glad she’s alive.

‘Me too,’ she agrees, and joins him back on the couch.

They’ve dozed off when Coulson finally gets back to them, the TV showing some late night stand-up. Laura’s head is on Clint’s shoulder, her legs over his lap, and Coulson doesn’t have the heart to move them until he’s done everything he has to do, and then he gently shakes Laura awake.

‘Go to bed,’ he whispers, and she nods, tells him she’s glad he’s alive.

Smiling, Coulson tells her he’s glad she’s safe, and leaves the room to the sound of her whispering low and gentle to Clint, who moans and groans and whinges and whines, but as Coulson turns back to shut his door, he sees her leading the assassin by the hand to the bedroom, and she offers him a smile before shutting her own door.

* * *

 

They get back to HQ and Fury is waiting for them.

‘I want to speak to Agent Harcourt alone,’ he says.

Coulson nods, and strolls off. Clint, however, lingers, and frowns.

‘Sir,’ he starts.

‘Alone means without you,’ Fury says, and Clint opens his mouth.

‘I’ll see you in the rec room,’ he tells Laura, who nods, and then he walks off out of the hangar, looking back over his shoulder every few steps.

Once he’s gone, and they’re alone, Fury says, ‘how is he?’

‘Good,’ Laura nods, ‘he’s angry, and he’s depressed, and he has a chip on his shoulder, but he’s good. He’s a good man.’

Fury nods, folds his arms and studies her. He’s a very intimidating sort of man when he does that, standing there in his all-black uniform with his single eye burrowing into her skull.

‘He almost compromised the mission,’ he says, and Laura shakes her head.

‘He was worried for my safety, sure,’ she says, ‘but he would have done his job, he knew that going in.’

‘Coulson had to order him twice to take the shot,’ Fury tells her, ‘Barton was too concerned about your safety to care about the mission. He has never done that before.’

Laura wrinkles her nose. ‘And you don’t want him to do it again, I suppose? I can’t make that promise, sir. If I go out of comms range, there isn’t anything I can do without compromising my mission too. I didn’t ask Clint to be concerned for my safety, and I’m not going to ask him to stop.’

‘The boys in the shooting range tell me he said that you will always be his priority.’

Laura continues to wrinkle her nose. ‘Again, nothing to do with me, sir. I do not own him, and I do not control him, and I would appreciate if you didn’t insinuate that I am inspiring insubordination.’

Fury snorts. ‘You’re overstepping, Harcourt. Barton was insubordinate long before you came onto the scene, and I doubt he’ll stop long after you’re gone from it.’

‘You’re reassigning me?’

‘I’m warning you.’

She squints at him. Fury has no need to warn her, there isn’t anything to warn about.

‘If I have to have a warning,’ she says, ‘then I would appreciate it if you would stop with these vague threats, _sir_. I am doing as you asked. I am being his partner, and I’m partnering him in the same way I’d partner any agent. If my methods offend you, if they are not suitable, then perhaps you should have considered who you would have partner him before you assigned me to him.’

Fury stares at her.

‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I have a report to write, and intel to check on. Good afternoon.’

Her heart is pounding, her vision tunnelling as she marches straight past him and out into the corridor.

‘You are one ballsy son of a bitch,’ Clint says from behind the door, and falls into step with her.

‘You are going to get me fired,’ she snaps back.

‘Nah, Fury likes you too much. But don’t make that a habit, good God. He’ll have you reassigned to desk duty in thirty seconds flat, and that’s only because no one picks up the phone any faster than that.’

She gives him a withering look.

‘I’m glad you’re alive,’ he says.

The way he looks at her as he says it, the way butterflies flap around in her gut, makes her feel like he’s thankful for a lot more than just a successful mission. But then he’s bidding her farewell and disappearing off to Level Seven to do his debrief, and leaving her to her own devices.

‘Bye,’ she calls to the empty corridor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- god i love the tropes i get to use in this fic!!!!!!  
> -r&r always appreciated!!!!


	4. Designated Getaway Driver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laura is always the getaway driver, but sometimes she needs to get away herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for death and incredibly lame pining

 

Months pass.

Clint and Laura become something of a tag-team, and their mission clearance rates become some of the best in S.H.I.E.L.D. history, which is great, it’s good news for this not-quite-legit assignment Laura’s been put on. Clint’s passing psych evaluations with flying colours, he’s getting more personable, making friends around HQ, he’s pleasant to be around and work with. His dog becomes a popular member of the in-house crew at the base. If anyone ever needed Laura for something, they just had to find Clint, Laura would not be far away, and vice versa. They were generally in each other’s pockets, eating lunch and dinner and training together, and it was considered –

It was good.

They – the bigwigs, the head honchos, the people with no common sense but lots of power – were talking of upgrading Laura to Level Seven. She told them to stick that kind of promotion where the sun doesn’t shine. She doesn’t want to be involved in Clint’s murder runs, and doesn’t need to be involved in them. He doesn’t tell her about them, she doesn’t ask, and she completes her objectives where they differ. She’ll run support for him, if Coulson’s unavailable, but she stays clear for the most part. He likes to keep it that way, and doesn’t take kindly to people asking her about his kill streak.

There’s a running bet, though no one will openly admit it, about when they’re going to shack up. Some people reckon it’s already happened, given their close nature, the casual touches, the way Laura will just drape herself over Clint’s shoulders when she’s tired of walking, the way she sits in his lap when chair space is scarce, the easy banter and lingering looks. Some people are betting on finding them in a cupboard or on the mats in the training room, or in a bathroom stall. It’s only a matter of time, they say, but it’s been months. Most agents with sexual tension work it out in weeks. Nature of the job, and all that.

So their missions are good, easy going, even when the tension is through the roof. Clint takes Laura out running, teaches her to throw a decent punch, has her working her ass off until she’s at a standard he deems acceptable. She makes sure he eats properly, and he piles the pounds of muscle on, becomes a solid wall instead of the ladder he’d looked when she met him.

Things are looking up across the board.

And then they get a mission in downtown Chicago. It should be a simple in and out, deal with money-laundering, kill or capture, the usual thing. Coulson isn’t available, and someone needs to go with Clint to make sure that they get the money.

‘Stay in the car,’ Clint says, and Laura nods, is happy to do so.

‘I have some paperwork for Fury to do anyway,’ she says, and Clint rolls his eyes.

‘A month,’ he says, wagging a finger at her as he pulls his goggles down over his eyes. ‘Fury said a month and here you are up my ass six months later.’

‘There’s an adult store a couple blocks away if you really want me up your ass,’ Laura calls after him, and he does a somersault just so he can stick his fingers up at her and look pretentious while he does it.

Normally, a money-laundering operation wouldn’t be so bad, but intel suggests there’s something even shadier going on underneath it all. Or in conjunction with it, the way criminals often have their fingers in several pies. Clint scrambles up the outside drainpipe and kicks the rooftop access door open. It’s not really a bow job, but he’s got it in hand anyway, because Laura thinks it’s cool, and he likes to have cool stories to tell her about the tricks he does with arrows, like flipping off of walls and doing somersaults and dives and shit. She thinks it’s great.

(She thinks it’s the stupidest thing she’s ever heard, but it makes him happy, and him being happy is all that matters. And she’s seen him do those flips and shit, and it’s genuinely quite impressive.)

But the good mood of finding stories for Laura soon fades when he realises what he’s just brute forced his way into. Intel had suggested shady shit, but it hadn’t reckoned on sex-trafficking.

He stands there looking at the blown-up photos on the wall, the documentation, the fax machine buzzing with details.

‘Fuck sake,’ he sighs.

‘What’s wrong?’ Laura asks from the earpiece.

‘You’d better get in touch with base,’ he says, ‘we’re going to need a clean-up crew here, there’s more than just money.’

‘We only came for money,’ she says, but agrees to get in touch with support. ‘Stay safe.’

‘I’m glad you’re alive,’ he replies, which has become some kind of safe word between them over the months.

Then he tunes her out, and goes about clearing the place. It had been kill-or-capture, but as far as Clint’s concerned, everyone’s lost the right to a fair trial. Kill the lot, make off with the money, get the girls – because they _are_ girls, he doesn’t think any of those photos were legal – somewhere safe, get the clean-up crew in there to help rehabilitate them, get them their papers, send them home, or set them up. Whatever it had to be. That’s not his job. His job is to get them safe.

So he does, and clears the building top to bottom of every money-laundering, sex-trafficking scumbag he comes across. There are some girls in the basement. He kicks the lock off the door, because that’s the kind of rage he’s in. The girls are terrified, and he doesn’t speak any of their languages to persuade them that he’s a good guy, that he’s there to help.

So he puts down his bow, holds up both hands, even though his blood is boiling and he’s seething, and sits down.

The girls slowly sit down with him, staying in the cell where they believe they’re safe, and they slowly start to chatter amongst themselves. Clint listens so that Laura can hear them.

‘One of them speaks Spanish,’ she says, ‘or Portuguese, I’m not sure. I only speak Italian and French. Um. Clean-up are on their way from the safehouse. They knew that there was a ring in town, but they couldn’t find it. They said to stay with the girls until they arrive.’

Clint nods.

‘Help’s on the way,’ he says to the girls, and the girls stare at him.

When clean-up arrives, Clint takes his leave, and is about to stroll out of the front door of the building, buoyed by the good deed and sinking with the rage still boiling in his gut when he hears Laura scream. It’s blistering over the earpiece, but he can hear it in the street, and he’s moving before he realises what’s happening.

 Laura has always been secure on any operation they’ve gone on. Clint has made it his first priority to make sure that no matter where she is, she’s safe, especially when she’s their getaway driver. Clint jokes about Bonnie and Clyde and robbing banks and making a run for it from S.H.I.E.L.D. but he always makes sure Laura is somewhere safe, somewhere where he knows if something happens, there will be witnesses for him to beat information out of.

 And here she is, about to get carjacked by one of the little fuckers that escaped him.

Wrong girl to carjack, Clint thinks, and before he’s really examined what he’s doing, he’s there, with the fucker’s head in one hand and he’s smashed it so hard against the edge of the open door he can hear something squish. Laura is still screaming, and Clint is still smashing the fucker’s head against the door.

‘Clint!’ Laura screams, ‘stop it! He’s dead, he’s dead, stop it!’

He lets go. The carjacker slides to the ground, leaving a smear of blood against the car door. Laura is on the other side of the car, clutching the passenger door like a lifeline. Clint looks at his hands, looks at them shaking.

He stares at the blood smears. He takes a breath. He takes another.

‘Laura,’ he says, looking up at her, and she’s in shock.

The anger wipes out of his system like a bucket of ice water emptied on his head. They stare at each other. A tear rolls down Laura’s cheek, and it feels like someone’s thrown the bucket at him too.

Snapping into action, Clint grabs the towel off the backseat, wipes the blood and brain off the car door, looks back to see one of the clean-up crew staring at him.

‘Get in,’ he tells Laura, as gently as he can, but adrenaline is carrying him. ‘I’ll drive.’

He doesn’t stop until they’re in the middle of nowhere and then they ditch the car. They get their bags, and he sets fire to the car. They watch it burn. Laura doesn’t say a word.

Clint hotwires a car they find at the next garage and before Laura’s even got her seatbelt on, he’s putting the pedal down and tearing off across the road, and he doesn’t slow down until they hit the traffic coming into New York.

Laura hasn’t said a word the entire time, and when they pull into the S.H.I.E.L.D. garage, she gets her bags and leaves without a word.

‘Laura,’ he calls, and she stops, but doesn’t turn back. ‘I – I’m sorry.’

He doesn’t know what else to say, and sorry doesn’t come nearly close enough to cover it.

‘It’s fine,’ she says, ‘don’t forget to do your report.’

* * *

 

‘I’ve blown it,’ Clint says to Coulson an hour later, standing in a phone booth in Brooklyn.

‘Have you tried talking to her?’ Coulson offers. It sounds like he’s under fire.

‘You don’t talk to girls, Phil, you know this. They’re weird and they smell and they hear things you don’t say.’

‘That’s no reason to not say anything, Clint.’

Phil has known Clint too long now to even pretend to listen to his nonsense. He’d been watching the archer grow more and more comfortable in his skin, watched his anger go down and his happiness go up, and he’s watched Clint moon over Laura since the day they met. He’s besotted by the girl, and if Phil knows his agent well enough, if he understands the mess of bad childhood and resentment and general maligned functionality that is Clint Barton, he’d go as far as to say he was in love with her.

But he doesn’t ever bring it up, because Clint doesn’t talk about his feelings, even though they get written all over his face every time he looks at Laura when she’s not looking, or he hasn’t heard her speak for five minutes. It’s been months, and he’s as besotted as he was in the first moment, just watching her with the kind of adoration you see on the faces of pilgrims seeing Bethlehem for the first time.

And, you know, walking in on him in the shower dealing with the unfortunate side effect of sharing a bed with Laura once is enough to get a measure of the man – ha, get it? No, but seriously, it had been a conversation Phil had not wanted to have with a twenty-three year old, but he’d done it, because it was his job to remind Clint to lock the bathroom door if he wanted to jack off, thanks.

 This isn’t to say that it’s been plain sailing. Clint has a temper, despite Laura’s general good influence being enough to calm the worst of it, and anything Laura does that he deems a stupid or unnecessary risk has created some awful tension on missions and they’ve had their rows over it. Phil has done his best to play advocate where he can, but they’re both opinionated fools who have no patience for the other’s assumed foolishness. Once, he found Laura sleeping in the bathtub because she couldn’t bear to be near Clint for a second longer, and once Clint had fallen asleep stood in the corner of the kitchen, because he’d been so mad about something Laura had said, but not once has Phil ever suggested that they just don’t share a bed.

(He’s in on the bet, too. He and Fury have agreed to share the winnings when they eventually win. And being handler doesn’t mean he’s doing his best to create the outcome that will render him victorious. No, of course not, he isn’t a cheater.)

‘Clint,’ Phil says, because Clint has just been standing there and not replying. ‘Listen, you’ll have to talk to her about this. She came to me about it, and I didn’t have an answer for her. What am I supposed to say? I’m not you, I can’t tell her what goes through your head.’

‘I’m just my dad,’ Clint says, ‘when you get right down to it, I’m just my dad. I try so hard to not be like him, but in the end everything I do is like him.’

‘No you aren’t, and you’re doing yourself no favours by making that comparison.’

‘But I am!’ Clint explodes, ‘don’t you see? It’s just an endless cycle of _bullshit_. This is probably how he started, ‘fore he married Ma, and then what? I beat my kids and get us killed in a fucking car crash, leaving them fucked up beyond any ability to have a healthy relationship?’

He grips the edge of the phone unit, and snarls at his boots. Phil doesn’t say a thing, just waits for him to breathe it out.

‘I fucked it up,’ Clint repeats, quieter, calmer. ‘I made a right mess, and no amount of cleaning’s going to get it sorted.’

At this, Phil tuts. ‘You underestimate that girl, Agent Barton,’ he says, ‘just give her time, she’ll come around.’

Clint doesn’t believe him, and is sick of not getting the validation for his self-loathing, and tells him to fuck off before hanging up.

* * *

 

When he gets into base the next day, Fury calls him into his office.

‘Laura has taken a month’s leave,’ he says before Clint’s even shut the door. ‘And before you ask, no I’m not telling you where she’s gone.’

‘This is because of the mission, isn’t it?’

‘You mean bashing a man’s brains out on the car door? Yes. Probably. But she’s not had a break from you for six months, and I’d assured her it would only be a month. The girl’s earned a rest. You have a mission in Ontario in two days, you’d best get prepared. Coulson has your brief.’

With that, he’s dismissed.

* * *

 

Laura goes home. She goes home, and she hugs her dad, and she cries. She cries until she doesn’t have anything left to cry, and Dean just holds her until she’s ready to let go. He doesn’t pretend to approve of the S.H.I.E.L.D. business, especially not since she got reassigned to this Barton fellow, because now she’s keeping secrets.

But her secrets are hers, and he won’t ask her to divulge anything she isn’t prepared to.

So he gives her a cup of tea, and fishes her favourite blanket out of the airing cupboard, and leaves her on the couch with the family dog and _Beverley Hills 90210_.

‘I think I made a mistake,’ she says later, much later, as they sit in the darkness of the kitchen after dinner.

A stand up show is playing on the TV in the lounge. The dog is snoring in her bed, and the dishes are unwashed. Laura has had half a bottle of rosé and Dean is drinking coffee to stay awake with her. It’s almost midnight; he’s normally in bed by now.

‘In what sense?’

 Laura smiles, and tears up, and Dean knows.

‘I see,’ he says.

‘I didn’t mean to, Dad,’ she says, and sounds so chewed up and spat out and heartbroken that he’s ready to march straight to the airport to go murder the little shit himself. ‘It just – happened.’

‘I knew it would,’ he admits, because he wouldn’t be much of a father if he promoted lying amongst his children. ‘When you posted those snaps from that job in Florida, when you were on the beach.’

Laura had been entirely unprofessional, and because they’d had a free day where Phil was blessedly busy but they weren’t – not that there weren’t things for them to do, of course, but there wasn’t any great need for it – Laura had bought a disposable camera and convinced Clint to don his beach shorts and go to the beach to just lounge around and admire her new bikini. She’d been a bit banged up and bruised, but nothing that wasn’t explainable by talking loudly about roller derby, and she’d taken photos of everything from Clint doing lunges to the way he’d tried to tap sand out of his hearing aids, to the sunset they’d stayed till and the pizza they’d bought on their way back to the safehouse, walking in sandals and swimwear and not caring a jot.

It had been possibly one of the best days of her life, and she’s not surprised her father had seen it for what it was.

‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘I guess it was a long time coming.’

‘I wish you’d let me meet him,’ he says, and Laura laughs into her wine.

‘It’s unlikely we’ll come this far west for work,’ she tells him, the way she’d told him in months two, three, four and five, every time the conversation came up on the phone. ‘But if we do, I’ll make sure we call by. But I – I don’t know if it’ll ever happen.’

Dean knew something was wrong when Laura asked him to pick her up from the airport, asked as an afterthought whether it was okay to stay for a few weeks.

‘You not going back?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, and frowns at the tabletop. ‘I will, probably.’

‘But not to him.’

‘I don’t know.’

He nods; his daughter knows her own mind, and knows her answers, and doesn’t need him to make the decisions she’s already chosen for herself. But he still wants to punch the little prick in the face.

‘Can I ask what he did?’

‘Nothing – well. It was something. But nothing like that. He wouldn’t hurt me.’

Dean waits a moment, but she doesn’t expand, so he says, ‘but he hurt someone for you.’

She laughs bitterly. ‘Am I so obvious?’

He reaches across the table and rests both hands on hers, squeezing gently.

‘You’re my daughter, Laura,’ he tells her, and smiles at her when she peers at him through smeared mascara. ‘And my favourite, I don’t have any shame in telling you that. I don’t like what you do, I think it’s dangerous, and I think your Clint Barton is going to be the death of you, but if he makes you happy, I’m not going to stand in your way. But you – I don’t know how far he took it, and I don’t want to know, because if it’s as far as I think, then I can’t blame him. I’d do the same.’

‘He _killed_ someone, Dad,’ she blurts out, because Laura has always been close to her dad, and she can keep secrets like the best, but he’s her dad, and she’s so tired and sad and lost, and she thinks she might die if she doesn’t get it out there. ‘Just smashed his head into the car until he died, because he tried to carjack me, and Clint’s – he’s a good man, but it was just so much.’

Dean nods, silent, and lets Laura breathe and get it out of her system; she’s done enough crying now.

‘Do you wish he hadn’t?’

‘I can handle a carjacker,’ she snorts, waving her hand dismissively. ‘I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again, I just – he was dead in the first blow, but he just – kept going.’

‘Are you scared of him?’

‘God no!’ Laura laughs, too loud in the quiet of the kitchen.

The TV ticks onto adverts, and the dog kicks at her bed, snuffling in her sleep.

‘I’m not scared of him at all.’

‘Laura.’

She licks her lips, looks anywhere but at her father.

‘I don’t think for a second he’d ever lay a finger on me, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s had plenty of chance and plenty of reason to give me a black eye. He wouldn’t hurt me.’

‘But you’re scared of him.’

‘He brained a man for coming near me, Dad, wouldn’t you be scared of that?’

Dean hums, and watches her for a moment. ‘I’m going up to bed, you’ll be alright?’

‘I’ll finish this glass, and then I’ll go to sleep.’

‘I’m sorry I haven’t gotten your bed made up, if I’d known, I’d have gotten your sheets washed.’

It’s one of Dean’s peculiarities, keeping a set of bedsheets for each of his children, so they don’t have to share. But he has to wash them before putting them on the bed if they haven’t stayed in a while, even though the airing cupboard is perfectly tidy. Laura laughs it off, but she’s found herself washing her sheets when she comes back from a long mission all the same.

‘I’m fine, Dad, honestly. I’ve slept in worse places than a couch.’

‘Well, I wish you wouldn’t.’

He gets to his feet, kisses her forehead, and says his goodnights. Laura lies on the couch a half-hour later, and stares at the ceiling until the sun begins to filter through the blinds.

* * *

 

It’s a week into her leave when Special Advisor Carter comes to visit. Laura has just got back from a run – her leave does not mean she needs to get sloppy – and comes into the kitchen for water when she realises there is someone else at the kitchen table. She stops, and stares, and then clears her throat.

‘Ma’am,’ she says, ‘don’t you think you’re too old to be breaking into people’s houses?’

‘Hardly,’ Carter sniffs, and waves over her shoulder. ‘I helped myself to tea. Your father got some nice blends in for you. He cares a lot.’

Laura’s dad has never drank tea, not even when it was the only thing around to drink. And he does care a lot, because he’s her dad. It’s the nature of the beast.

‘Yes,’ she says, and pours herself lemon water from the jug in the fridge. ‘He does. Why are you here, if I can ask? My leave was cleared with Director Fury.’

‘I know,’ Carter replies, and gestures next at the chair opposite her. Laura takes it, because she has to. ‘I’m not here on his orders. I wanted to talk to you.’

‘I’m not able to discuss business while I’m on leave, ma’am. You know that.’

‘I’m not asking business, I’m asking personal.’

Laura says nothing, and just drinks her water.

‘You must think I’m daft,’ Carter starts, and sets her mug down. There are no teacups in the Harcourt house, as much as Laura tries to convince her dad of the benefits. ‘To not realise what’s going on.’

‘There’s nothing going on for you to realise, ma’am. I’m sorry if you thought there was.’

And Peggy Carter, too old to be dealing with interpersonal dramas and emotional disasters, just sits there, and smiles.

‘I can handle my feelings, ma’am,’ Laura says, when the smile grows to be too still to be pleasant. ‘And I have no doubts of my working relationship with Agent Barton going forwards. I was overdue my leave for this year, and after the mission in Chicago I needed to – to – I needed to think.’

‘And what have you thought?’ Carter asks.

‘That I’m a fool. That it’s been incredibly unfair for me to remain partnered to him like this, that sometimes it feels like a shackle around my throat.’

She takes a shuddering breath, and shakes her head.

‘I’ll return to work,’ she says, staring at her hands, squeezed tight on the edge of the table, ‘and I’ll continue to partner him, I just needed time away from him, is all.’

‘Yes,’ Carter says, and reclines in her chair a little, just enough that she can look down her nose. ‘I can see that. You’ve done remarkably well, Agent Harcourt. Better than we hoped.’

‘But less than you expected?’

‘Well, we all have our downfalls,’ Carter says, and gets to her feet.

Laura feels like she’s failed a test, somewhere along the line. But she is only human, and humans can only do so much, especially when they’re under the scrutiny of Special Advisor Carter, who hasn’t had hide nor hair seen of her in the last six months.

Laura gets to her feet as well, and follows the former director to the door.

‘I’ll see you when you return,’ Carter says, ‘and don’t worry about Barton in your time off, we have him well under control.’

With that, Carter is strolling off down the drive back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. SUV that Laura had only half noticed – sloppy, on her part. She should have known to suspect every black vehicle parked near her father’s house. Carter gets inside, and Laura watches them drive away.

* * *

 

They did not, in fact, have Barton well under control.

* * *

 

Clint makes it through the first week of not having Laura around mostly normally. This is mostly due to the fact he’s on a mission for four of the seven days, and the other three are spent recovering from his injuries. It’s just bruised ribs, so he’s up and about again by Monday. And that’s where he starts to get antsy.

By the end of the second week, it’s almost like Laura had never been there at all; he’s irritable and stand-offish and prone to fighting in the corridors, but it all carries a vague undertone of Laura with it. He gets into fights because someone says something about her he doesn’t agree with, or makes a joke at her expense. He whines and moans and bitches and brags and brags and brags about her to anyone and everyone he talks to. Poor Michelle on front desk has it up to her ears dealing with him asking every morning if she’s heard from her, and no amount of explaining that she doesn’t talk to Laura outside of work will satisfy him.

The third week, he meets Bobbi Morse, and everything goes from bad to worse. He’d been sufferable, just about, because everyone was ignorant as to why Laura had taken a full month of leave, and had just chalked Clint’s attitude up to withdrawal symptoms of having his pocket-mate suddenly gone from his life, like when a puppy is separated from its owner. Standard behaviour, and they could mostly stomach it by sending him out on errands and missions and training operations.

But then Bobbi comes onto the scene, and it’s just –

Fury has to call him into his office and ask him outright if the fraternisation is a good idea.

‘What?’ Clint asks, because fraternisation is too big a word to be using when he’s got a hangover the size of a full bottle of vodka.

(What he does in his free time is nobody’s business, and what he does is very much not cope.)

‘Your little autumnal fling with Agent Morse, Barton, is it a good idea?’

Clint stares at him from across the table.

‘Don’t you think Laura might have an opinion?’

‘She’s not my mother, Director, sir,’ Clint says, in the kind of tone you’d expect to hear come out of a teenage boy’s mouth when he’s just been called out by his history professor. ‘I can date someone if I want.’

Fury does not mention the betting pool that has reached four figures.

Instead he mentions that Laura is due back in just over a week and a half, and he might want to get his attitude fixed before she does.

‘Sir,’ Clint says, and narrows his eyes. ‘I’m fine. Laura is probably fine, I’ve not heard from her, but I’m not going to chew her out over it, it’s her business what she does on leave, and she’s with her family, so I’m not about to interfere. We’ll be able to work together just as well as we did before, and it’ll make things easier if I’ve got some healthy distraction.’

‘And is that what Agent Morse is, Agent Barton? A healthy distraction?’

‘Not at all.’

‘You love her,’ Fury throws out, just to see what Clint does.

‘Bit early to be saying that, isn’t it? I’ve only been with her three days.’

‘I didn’t mean Morse.’

Clint gives him a flat look, and then laughs. It sounds fake, nervous, too loud in the silence of the office.

‘You haven’t been Director long enough to need to retire, sir. Maybe you need a break, too.’

He strolls out of the office like nothing is wrong, like he’s not about to undo six months of hard work on Laura’s part by sleeping with the wrong woman. Laura, from what Fury understands, is not the jealous type, but she’s never had to compete for Clint’s affections. He wonders if there will even be a competition, because Clint is so desperately in love with her, even though he won’t acknowledge it. Bobbi Morse is everything Laura isn’t, and it seems like such a terrible idea.

He calls for Morse, just to warn her about what she’s gotten into. She seems to be perfectly aware.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she tells him, with a wave of her hand, because Morse is the kind of cocksure that comes with a disproportionately experienced youth. ‘I’ve got him under control. He’s nice enough, definitely needs someone to fuss over and make googly eyes at, but I’m not going to fall for him. I’ll be sad to see him go, but I know he just wants to pretend like he doesn’t like Laura now he’s got that black mark for breaking Rumlow’s nose.’

Fury doesn’t say that Rumlow deserved it, even though he did. Bringing up that exchange in the elevator, when Laura took full leave of her senses and tried to strip off her blouse, was not the wisest idea to do when Barton was bouncing off the walls.

Instead, he tells her to report to Coulson once a week for an update into Barton’s wellbeing.

‘I reckon once Laura comes back, I’ll get dropped,’ Morse says, ‘but I don’t mind so much, he’s fun.’

‘Whatever you’re not saying about what you do in your free time, Morse, feel free to keep it to yourself.’

She smiles at him, and takes her leave back to her paperwork.

* * *

 

Clint has to look up the time difference between New York and Idaho (two hours, incidentally) and calls the Harcourt house when he’s sure Laura is on her run. Dean picks up, and tells him to fuck off.

‘How did you know it was me?’ Clint asks.

‘Where did you think Laura got her brains? Her mother’s an architect.’

But he says it teasingly, because Laura did get her brains from her mother. She got her sensibilities from her father, has nowhere near the level of ruthlessness that he’d found so attractive in her mother, until it drove them apart. He’s still fond of her, though, of course.

‘How is she?’ Clint asks, instead of dignifying it with an answer.

Dean doesn’t mind Clint so much, not now that they’ve spoken. Clint called every other day, just to check in, from the second week, once he’d worked out where she’d gone.

‘She’s better,’ Dean says, ‘she’s starting to talk about coming back to work.’

‘Good, good. I miss her.’

Dean would be a fool if he didn’t know that. None of her other partners have ever called her father’s house every other day to make sure she’s alright.

‘She misses you, too, I think. She doesn’t talk about things much, but she always smiles when she talks about you.’

It isn’t a lie, even though it sounds like it should be one. She’d not mentioned anything she’d said on that first night since, and she only ever sounds fond of Clint, the way one sounds fond of your husband of a lifetime.

‘Okay,’ Clint says, ‘good. Thank you. Have a good day.’

He hangs up before he can say anything incriminating or foolish, and so misses Dean’s invitation to join them for not-Christmas. They don’t celebrate Christmas, but they don’t celebrate Hanukkah either, just some vaguely seasonal thing with presents and too much food and increasingly ridiculous trees and one year they had a box hedge in the corner, because Todd had found it on the side of the road on his way back from a trucking expedition and thought it was too funny to leave when it was cut into the shape of a flamingo.

* * *

 

Clint waits outside her apartment the day she’s due back, just camps there on her fire escape with his dog and waits, and Laura, with her suitcases and her messy braid and sweatsuit, just stares at him.

‘Really?’ she asks.

‘Nice sweatsuit,’ he says, and she continues to stare at him.

Then she cocks her head to the side and gives him an incredulous wrinkle of her nose.

‘Clint, I’m back at work tomorrow, you didn’t have to wait out here for me – how long have you been waiting?’

‘Since I knew your flight got in,’ he says, and gets to his feet. His knees are sore, but he shakes each leg in turn and goes to get her cases from her. ‘I didn’t want to miss you.’

She rolls her eyes, but accepts the help with a month’s supply of clothes, and unlocks the doors to let them in. Lucky follows on their heels, nice and restrained, even though his tail is wagging a mile a minute.

‘You didn’t have to,’ she tells him, and he shrugs, inches his way into the elevator.

‘I wanted to. I’ve missed you.’

At this, her cheeks go a little pink, matching the pink sections of her sweatsuit, and she smiles.

‘I missed you too,’ she says.

When they get back to her apartment, she goes to open all the windows and get the musty smell out, while Clint goes to put her cases on her bed for her, calling over his shoulder about changing her sheets.

‘Yes, yes,’ Laura calls, throwing open her balcony doors. ‘I’ll do it before I have a bath.’

There’s an odd silence from the bedroom; normally, Clint would have had some quip about staying to wash her back at the ready, even though he’d never do anything of the sort unless she was too injured to do it herself. But the silence lingers, and she pads over to the door to find him fiddling with a picture on her dresser.

‘Are you alright?’ she asks, ‘did something happen while I was away?’

He opens his mouth, closes it. His ears go red, and he licks his lips. Laura’s heart is in her throat, her belly tight. She’s missed him a lot, and she can say till the cows come home that she can handle her feelings, but it’s got nothing on the way she feels looking at him now, standing in her bedroom and blushing.

‘I’m, um. You know Bobbi?’ he asks.

Laura racks her brains. ‘Morse, right? The blonde in Level Six with the sticks. Super pretty, I was very jealous when she was doing her thing in the gym that once, I’ll never be able to do a double somersault like that. I can barely do one, never mind - ’

‘I slept with her,’ he blurts out, cutting her off, and she falls silent.

Her heart hammers in her belly, a dying fish flip-flopping alongside it.

‘Oh,’ she says.

‘A few times. We’re kind of. Dating. I think. I asked her out, and she said yes.’

‘Yeah,’ Laura says, sounding very distant, ‘I guess that’s dating.’

‘She’s nice,’ Clint offers, and puts the picture back on her dresser. ‘I’m, uh.’

‘She make you happy?’

‘Yeah,’ he nods. ‘Um. Not like you do. In a different way. Don’t tell her I said it, but I prefer you.’

Laura does not take comfort from that. She takes the opposite of a comfort from it, actually.

‘Okay,’ she says, ‘you’re not going to be weird on missions now, are you? I mean, I’m assuming we’re still working together, Fury hasn’t called me to tell me there’s anything different.’

Clint shakes his head. ‘No, it’s not going to interfere on missions at all. Bobbi’s really cool about it, actually, I was going to ask Fury if we still needed to be partners, but she told me it was better for us – me and you, I mean – if we still worked together. I mean, if you still want to.’

Laura wants to spend the rest of her life with him, but she’s done that night of heavy drinking and sobbing into her glass, she’s not going back there when she’s sober and had a month to process it.

‘Of course,’ she smiles. ‘We’ve got a good thing going, it’d be a shame to spoil it.’

She feels like the last month has been spent going in circles, and she’s grateful when Clint ends the conversation before doing another loop.

‘Hey,’ he says, halfway out the door. ‘What happened, before you left – ‘

‘It’s fine,’ she promises, and she reaches out to touch his arm. She hasn’t touched him the entire time he’s been here, and it’s felt so wrong. Feeling the warmth of him beneath his parka is a relief she hadn’t known she’d needed. ‘Honestly. I – I never blamed you, I never did. I just – it was a lot to take in, and please – I can handle carjackers in future.’

‘It should never have happened,’ he tells her, in a single breath, and he’s looking so worried, and so lost, and so desperate to explain himself that she almost laughs. ‘I shouldn’t have let him get out of the building to get to you. What if he hadn’t just been trying to escape, what if he’d had a knife or a gun or what if it wasn’t just you sat in a car listening to the radio? What if I hadn’t been able to get to you? What if – ‘

She cuts him off with a hug, dragging him down into her shoulder with her arms around his neck.

‘Shut up,’ she says, ‘I’m safe, you’re safe. He’s dead. It’s done, and there’s no need to dwell.’

He clutches so tightly she can feel the pinch of skin on her back, and he breathes deeply into her neck, folding into her like he was always meant to fit. She’s pulled onto her toes, but she doesn’t care, just holds him so close she wonders if they’ll be able to pull apart.

‘I missed you,’ he repeats, quiet.

Her lip wobbles, and she can’t bring herself to reply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- i almost forgot this was set in the 90s and nearly put laura in 2010s fashion, but nope, its the godawful 90s sweatsuits in bright purple and pink and blue all day long. god how does clint survive when 90s gym wear was leotards i love it   
> \- there is so much more terrible pining to come oh me oh my  
> \- sorry its shorter than normal, but i'll make up for it!!!!!  
> \- hope you enjoyed my lovelies!


	5. How to Miss Your Chance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint takes the wrong chance, and Laura misses hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some violence, and daft birds pining
> 
> Enjoy, my lovelies~!

Winter is in full swing in Manhattan, so Laura forgoes her skirts for trousers and sensible shoes, bundling up under thick scarves and heavy coats and stops curling her hair. Clint seems to be the same as ever, swanning about with his arms on show like there’s nothing unusual about it. She mentions it to him at least once a day, demanding he at least put a sweater on. He’ll promise to do so, but waits until her back is turned before sticking his freezing hands under her sweater at the small of her back. She screeches like a banshee every single time, and he laughs every single time. Everyone in visual range gets a kick out of it like there’s no tomorrow, and Laura can never catch him to give his shins a good kicking.

 For the most part, things are as they were Before, in that nebulous time between eyeballing each other like poisonous snakes and seeing grey matter splattering against a car door. You know, that Before. It’s mostly like that. They’re laughing and pranking each other, and calling each other rude names over the comms while on missions, and apparently in the month that Laura was gone, her propensity for accusing him of having hawk eyes had spread among the other agents to the point that some of the new recruits thought it was his made-up name.

They call codenames made-up names and Laura has never felt so proud of her business in her life. Made-up names. She laughs about it for a solid week before Clint comes trotting over with a file to show her. He’s only gone and actually confirmed his codename as Hawkeye. She asks if it’s because he’s from Iowa, and he stares at her in horror.

‘How did you know?’ he asks.

‘What, that you’re from Iowa, or that the team’s called the Hawkeyes?’

‘Either,’ he says, and she watches the smile curling at his lip.

She tells him to stop pulling her leg, and go back to work.

But some things have changed. She won’t sit on his lap any more, standing even after someone else has offered a seat. They don’t go to dinner anymore; Clint always says goodbye, of course, but he’s off chasing Bobbi’s skirts, and she can’t be bitter about it, she supposes. It’s not like she liked him walking her home after dinner. She goes to Vanni’s once, when she’s sure they’re somewhere else, and Vanni’s wife takes one look at her and gives her a very strong drink indeed.

Vanni later tells her, when his wife has managed to get a word in edgewise, that Clint hasn’t been in for a couple months, and he’d wondered if everything was alright, but he’d heard on the grapevine that he’d gotten himself a girlfriend.

‘I thought it’d be you,’ he says, sitting at the other side of the table.

The eatery is technically closed. His daughter Bianca is sweeping the floor behind him, and is saying some choice things about Clint under her breath in her native Italian.

‘We’ve missed you here, _passerotta_ , so hearing it wasn’t you.’ Vanni shakes his head. ‘I am glad he hasn’t come by.’

Laura, at the end of her too-strong drink and feeling the buzz behind her eyes, snorts. ‘You don’t need to threaten him, Vanni. She makes him happy, and that’s what matters.’

‘But he’s not making you happy.’

She shakes her head. ‘No, I suppose not. But it’s not the point.’

Vanni purses his lips. Bianca calls him some rude names, tells him to let her be, to call her a cab to get her home safe since that brat wasn’t going to be walking her home.

‘I’m not drunk,’ Laura assures, and trips over the chair leg when she stands.

Vanni insists on calling her a cab. Laura wishes he hadn’t, she kind of wants to get into a fight.

(She doesn’t, but seeing Clint’s face every day doesn’t help with the management of feelings and so on.)

They have a few short-term missions, quick little things that take less time than it does to travel to and from the places, and Laura gets called into Fury’s office each time to discuss attitudes and behaviours and whether what she told Special Advisor Carter was true.

She assures him each time that it was true, and is still true, and she can handle her feelings just fine. But then she’ll see Bobbi in the corridor, or whispering with Clint in a quiet corner of the cafeteria, and she feels something bubble in her gut.

* * *

 

Clint never comes by to pick up the clothes he’d left at her apartment, and Laura hates opening the closet to find the duffel bag at the bottom, half-covered with shoes and S.H.I.E.L.D. gear, sitting there and waiting for the next time Clint needs to change. There’s nowhere else really for her to put it, except throw it out the window, so she just keeps looking at it and hating thinking about all the things that were.

* * *

 

Fury calls Clint to his office after the second mission ends with the agent getting another black eye courtesy of Agent Harcourt.

‘Sort your shit out,’ are the first words out of Fury’s mouth.

Clint hasn’t even sat down, and points that out, but the look on Fury’s face – not that there is a look on it, because Fury doesn’t need to stoop to giving out looks like candy – has him clacking his jaws shut and sitting his ass down.

‘I can’t order you to stop seeing Morse,’ Fury says, and Clint snorts. ‘But I can warn you that this attitude you’ve got is going to cost Laura her life.’

It’s the first time Clint has heard Fury use anybody’s first name. He’s so shocked by that, that he takes longer than he should to acknowledge what followed the use of her name.

‘What?’ he asks, ‘what do you mean, it’ll cost her her life? No, it won’t, I’m not any different on missions than I was before. She’s not jealous or anything, sir, for fuck sake, she’s my best friend. She’s _happy_ for me.’

But as he says it, he hears the lie it sounds. He’d not be worth his clearance if he hadn’t noticed how miserable Laura was looking more and more these days, and he knows he’s been – neglecting – her, after a fashion. Everything that they used to, he now does with Bobbi, and it’s not like he doesn’t still spend time with her, but he supposes –

He doesn’t spend much downtime with her, not these days. Only when Bobbi isn’t available, really, and even then, he’s usually trying to find something to occupy himself with.

He doesn’t remember the last time he took Laura to dinner.

‘Wow,’ he says, ‘I’m a bad friend.’

Fury murmurs something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like, ‘you’re bad at helping me win a bet,’ but he pretends he hasn’t heard it, because he has no idea what it means, and it wouldn’t do him any favours to start asking questions.

‘I’ll – I’ll change it, sir,’ he says, and gets to his feet. He knows Laura is in the rec room, she’s always in the rec room when she does her mission paperwork.

He goes straight to her and asks her out to lunch. She looks at him, and is silent for so long he’s scared she’s going to say no.

But then she says yes, and immediately packs up her things, instead of finishing what she was doing, like she was scared he’d change his mind. Christ, he thinks, looking at her as they walk to Vanni’s, her all bundled up. He’s been a bad friend.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and Laura gives him a baffled look.

‘What on earth for?’

‘I’ve been a bad friend lately,’ he says, ‘I completely ditched you for Bobbi, and that’s not fair, and I’m sorry.’

She smiles, but it’s sad. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, ‘not the first time a significant other’s become more of a priority.’

It jolts him to the core; she’d been reprimanded, after the mission to the gala, when he’d lost contact with her, all those months ago. He’d said, out loud, that she was his priority, and he’d let her fall to the bottom of the pile, without even realising he’d done it, because he hadn’t been minding himself. They’d been bantering, and he could put his hands under her clothes, and he still trained with her, when he had the time, but she’d been less and less his first port of call.

‘Fuck,’ he says, and stops walking.

It’s raining, a little, a fine drizzle, and he doesn’t have a hood on his coat. Laura is bundled up, under a hat and a hood, and she’s got her hands dug into her pockets.

‘It’s fine,’ she tells him, ‘honestly. You’ve got a girlfriend, and I – I put in a request to HR.’

The bottom of his stomach drops out.

‘What for?’

‘I thought it might be. Better. If we switched out. Me and her, I mean. She’s better at combat than I am, and her espionage is some of the best.’

‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘No, I don’t want that. That’s not – that’s not fair. We’re – we’re a team, you can’t just be replaced like that.’

She shrugs. ‘I put the request in. They’ve got to review it, they might say no.’

‘Were you not going to tell me?’ he asks, and she looks at her feet.

‘I would have, if they’d said yes.’

He’s hurt. He’s really, genuinely fucking hurt. But he just nods.

‘Yeah, that makes sense,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry that I made you feel like you should. I don’t want you to be reassigned.’

 She doesn’t remind him that they were never supposed to be partnered this long, and tells him that they’ll both catch colds if they stay standing out here much longer.

* * *

HR refuses her application for reassignment, because that’s what it was, in the end. She wanted to get away from him, and he feels disgusting.

‘I need to change things,’ he tells Bobbi.

She’s naked, and sweaty, and really very, very pretty. He doesn’t deserve her, but she’s here anyway. For a moment, she doesn’t reply to him, and then she shrugs.

‘Do what you have to do,’ she says, and gets up to stretch and pad to the bathroom. ‘You gotta do something, though, or you’ll lose her.’

Clint is too absorbed in the thought of the last time he saw Laura doing the same thing, the walking away from him towards the bathroom thing – only she’d had her underwear on, and he’ll never get over how nice her ass looked in a thong – to really listen to what she’s saying. All he knows is something has to change, and he has to strike a balance between his friendship with Laura and his relationship with Bobbi, and hadn’t he fucking _said_ that he preferred Laura’s company? It wasn’t a lie, and it still isn’t a lie. Even if they’re just sitting in a car driving to a mission, it’s the best part of his day. For fuck sake.

‘You don’t mind if I don’t spend Christmas with you, do you?’ he asks, and Bobbi, rinsing her mouth out, gargles something that sounds like “fuck no.”

‘Course I don’t,’ she says, when she’s spat the mouthwash out, ‘I’ve got a mission anyway, over in the UK. They want me to do some bullshit with the SAS or whatever. You know how this shit is.’

Clint does know how that shit is, and tries to hide his relief. Bobbi will be gone for a few weeks, and that will give him breathing room to patch things with Laura.

* * *

He patches them really, really well. It’s almost like he’d never brained someone by the time Christmas week rolls around. Bobbi’s been gone most of the time, and he’s been taking Laura out to dinner, and he took her bowling the other day, and she’s too chickenshit to run in the cold, but he makes her go for walks with him and Lucky, who has been very, very glad to see Laura again. He’d liked Bobbi well enough, but the first time he saw Laura waiting for them in Central Park, he’d torn across the grass so fast he almost bowled a child over, and he’d run circles around Laura so fast she’d tripped over him trying to get a hold of him.

They sprawl out in her living room, Laura using his back as a table to do her paperwork with. Clint flicks through a catalogue.

‘Hey,’ she says, after a minute of silence. They’d spent the last couple days in the Bronx, fishing out some money-launderers, and they’d had a comfortable time doing it, too. Laura’s right hooks are improving by the day, and her driving is getting worse.

‘Hm?’ he asks, and turns his head.

She’s looking at him with a soft look, something that he’s not too ashamed to admit he’d gotten into predicaments over in the past, because Laura had a way of looking at him that nobody else in his life had ever managed to do, and it made every part of him burst into smouldering flames and he hated how much he loved it.

‘I got you a Christmas present. I’d say I hope it’s okay, but I don’t care.’

He snorts, and she takes her paperwork off his back so he can sit up. The way he swings his legs up almost puts her in his lap, but she wriggles back to give him room. Her living room floor isn’t really the place for them to be lying, but it was comfortable and warm and Jerry Springer re-runs were illuminating the side of her face in a way the overhead light wasn’t.

‘It’s super okay,’ he says, and gives her a bemused smile. Then he flushes, clears his throat. ‘I, uh, I didn’t get you anything. I wasn’t sure it was okay, and I didn’t want to make things weird, and I’ll get you something as soon as I get time to go into town, I promise, I just didn’t thi – ‘

She slaps a hand over his mouth, her fingers warm with tea and inkstains, and God he’s never wanted to kiss the smile on her mouth more. She’s beautiful, she’s so fucking beautiful and he’s in love with her. He’s in love with her and he has been since he first saw her, and he’s in like-like with Bobbi, sure, she’s fun and good company and doesn’t mind that he’s got Issues, but this is –

Shit.

Content that he’s going to be silent – though not for the reasons she thinks he’s being quiet – Laura gets up and goes over to the bookshelves and pulls down a decorative box, reaching inside to pull a smaller, wrapped box out of it.

‘It’s not much,’ she says, tugging at her ear. ‘But I thought – I saw it and I thought of you, so I got it for you.’

 He takes it from her, and looks at it.

‘Can I open it now?’ he asks.

‘I’m going back home in a couple days,’ she says, with a shrug. ‘So I won’t be around to see you open it on Christmas day.’

‘Do you even celebrate Christmas?’ he asks.

‘We celebrate eating lots of chocolate,’ she tells him, looking very proud of that fact, and he laughs.

‘I’ll leave it till the big fake day,’ he says, ‘I’ll call you when I open it and call you rude names.’

She snorts, and shoves at him with a foot. He tackles her legs, and catches her head when he topples her into his lap.  She’s laughing, and he’s laughing, and it’d be so easy to kiss her.

So he does.

Or almost does, but as soon as she realises what it is he’s moving to do, she’s jerking her head back, and her hand is on his chest, and she’s looking at him like he’s got three heads.

‘I,’ he starts, and she scrambles to her feet, tugging her sweater straight.

‘You’re _seeing_ someone, Clint,’ she says, ‘that’s not – that’s not fair.’

He swallows, feels cold. ‘I’ll go,’ he says, and gets to his feet.

She nods, her fingertips over her mouth. ‘That’d be best,’ she says.

He gets his coat, and shoves his feet into his Timberlands, and turns back to her. She’s looking a little teary, and he feels about two inches tall.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I – thank you, for the present, and I’ll – have a good time at your dad’s, okay?’

She nods, and chokes out something similar in reply, and then he’s letting the door close behind him.

He gets halfway down the street before he yells swearwords at the top of his lungs, and a scandalised old lady calls him a rude name in reply. His laugh is bitter, but he’s grateful to be called rude things, because he’s all of it and more.

‘Fucking idiot,’ he tells himself, and kicks a trash can on the kerb over.

* * *

 

Laura moves her flight forward to the next morning, and Coulson leaves thirteen messages on his apartment’s answer machine, all of them rude.

Clint buys a bottle of vodka and a bag of chips, and lets the TV be the only light in the apartment.

* * *

 

He wakes in a state on Christmas morning, and he’s only aware it’s Christmas morning because the TV is playing a Christmas movie. Lucky is asleep on his bed, still moping. He’d been moping ever since Clint got back from Laura’s that first night, because he’d known something was wrong in his dad’s life, but he’d not known what it was, and his sadness had made the pup sad. They’d been sad together, moping about the apartment, and waiting for the days to pass. Coulson had said, when Clint finally called him back, that he didn’t need to come into HQ until they called him.

‘We won’t really be sending you on any missions until Laura’s back,’ he’d said, and Clint had made a noise in the back of his throat like a dog about to be sick. ‘What’s wrong?

‘I don’t know if she’s coming back this time,’ Clint said, ‘I really fucked it up this time.’

‘It sounds like you’re about to break into song, so feel free to not do that,’ Coulson sighed. ‘Listen, she told me she was moving her flight, but she didn’t say why. I had a feeling something had happened.’

‘Something almost happened,’ Clint had admitted, pressing the phone so tight to his ear the audio crackled. ‘It almost happened and it shouldn’t have, and I fucked it up.’

Coulson had done his best to comfort him, but without knowing what he did – and no doubt, Coulson was thinking of a lot worse than an almost kiss that Clint desperately wishes he hadn’t attempted to take, because the rejection was almost worse than the want of it in the first place – there was little he could do, so he’d had to leave Clint to his sulking.

And sulk he did. There was a lot of it to go around, and he’d sulked until Christmas arrived, and then he’d woken up to a merry little movie and he’d hated everything.

‘Morning, boy,’ he says to Lucky, who comes and licks his face.

He’d bought the dog special food, for the occasion, and he wolfs it down. Clint makes coffee and drinks it as black as he can make it, staring at his reflection in the mirror. It’s an ugly reflection, with dark circles and stubble and messy hair, and he feels as bad as it looks. He’s a fool, and he’s lost her.

Lucky woofs and huffs and whines at the counter, where Laura’s present waits for Clint to open. He’d bought her a mug. It’s ugly and it’s got purple arrows on it, and he saw it at the end of a day’s blind panic trying to shop for a suitable gift. Everything had been either too dramatic, or too offensively nothing, and he’d seen the mug and had thought of her and smiled, and so he’d bought it. Mugs are useful, after all, and she does like tea. It’s not a teacup, but he doesn’t think she’d mind. She might not even accept it.

Too late now, he supposes, she’s the other side of the country with her dad, and her brothers who probably want to deck him, and he hasn’t thought about Bobbi in days.

He flops onto the couch and unwraps the present, and opens the box, and stares at it.

It’s only little, but it’s a Saint Christopher, on a little silver chain. There’s no card attached, but the whole thing smells like her perfume, like she’d been wearing it or something, and he sits there and stares at it, and maybe he gets a little choked, maybe he doesn’t.

After the caffeine’s hit, he calls her dad’s line, and an unfamiliar man answers.

‘Harcourts,’ he says, and Clint clears his throat.

‘Hi, uh – is – is Laura there?’

‘Sure thing, hold on. Laura! It’s your boyfriend!’

The holler is blistering, and Clint actually takes the phone away from his ear, and fiddles with his hearing aid while he waits. Could shouting through a phone break it, he wonders, and wonders if the lab rats have worked on the in-ear ones any further, because he’s getting sore bits where the earpieces are digging in now, but that’s mostly because he’s wearing them at night, when he’s on missions, or on good terms with Laura. And he still – well, he doesn’t not trust Bobbi, but he only ever really, really sleeps around Laura. And he’d only recently starting taking his aids out at night around her, just before the mission in Chicago. It had been terrifying, sleeping next to her and being unable to hear her breathing. He’d held onto her the first couple nights, and she’d been more than happy to be held, seemed to sleep better for it.

He tried not to dwell on it, but she fit in his arms much better than Bobbi did.

‘He’s not my boyfriend, Todd, I swear blind,’ Laura is saying, and then she huffs out a breath. ‘Clint, I’m guessing.’

‘You had three guesses and you didn’t need a single one,’ he laughs. ‘Hello, Laura.’

‘Hello, honey,’ she says, ‘you sound hungover, have you been out celebrating?’

‘In and sulking,’ he says, because she has a way of making him be honest about the wrong things.

‘What? Why on earth are you sulking? It’s like, the season to be jolly, and all that. Oh, because of – was it because I moved my flight? It wasn’t because of what happened, I promise, Todd had a change of delivery route, so he could come by the airport to get me if I got on an earlier flight is all, I should have told you, I’m sorry.’

She’s a terrible liar, but it’s not totally a lie. He’s sure Todd’s route did change, but she’s never been bothered about getting a lift from the airport before, able to rent and drive her own car, like she says she’s done every year since she moved away from home. She wanted to get away from him that bit faster, and he can’t blame her.

‘It’s fine,’ he laughs, ‘and I’m just sulking because I’m alone at Christmas.’

Laura’s dad yells in the background that he tried to ask Clint over for dinner, but he hung up before he got chance to, and Laura calls him a rude name under her breath.

Clint doesn’t think, even if he had received the invite, that he’d have gone now, given that he tried to kiss her and it – well.

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry about – what happened. I got – caught up in the moment, and I – I like you. A lot.’

‘I like you a lot too,’ she says, ‘too much, probably. I’m – flattered. That you did, but I’m not going to get into that kind of situation, Clint. You’re my partner, and my friend. Above everything else, I can’t jeopardise that, not for something as – as flaky as this.’

Flaky, Clint thinks. Is that the reputations he’s got now? He can’t blame her, he’s been a dick.

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I understand.’

‘Do you?’ she asks, and then he thinks she shakes her head, it’s the kind of action that fits into the space between the question and what she says next. ‘Anyway, I’ll be back in New York in a few days, you can behave yourself until then, right? No more fighting with Rumlow or getting yourself into street brawls, okay? I don’t need to come back to find you in the hospital.’

‘I wouldn’t go to the hospital.’

‘I know,’ she sighs, ‘that’s what worries me.’

He’s touched.

‘I’m touched,’ he tells her, ‘but don’t worry about me. I told you before, I’m not worth the worry, now more than ever. Give your dad and brother my best.’

‘I have two,’ she says, and he tells her that he doesn’t like the accountant, so she says, ‘you’ve never met him to not like him.’

‘I don’t need to meet him, you get a look on your face when you talk about him, and it makes me not like him. I like the trucker, he can stay.’

Laura snorts.

‘Get lost, dummy,’ she tells him, and tells him to stay safe.

‘I’m glad you’re alive,’ he tells her, and hangs up.

* * *

 

He can’t stop thinking about how she put in a request with HR to transfer away from him, and he wonders, as Bobbi comes back from the UK looking contemplative, whether it’s time for him to do a long ass solo mission. Let her get on with her work away from him. He’s turned down some missions because they’ve been solo, and Rumlow’s doing his head in with all his bragging about it.

It’s probably for the best.

* * *

 

He’s gone when she gets back to New York, on the other side of the world, somewhere in Africa, dealing with some shitty American black market business, and she finds that she misses him. Coulson brings Lucky by a few hours after she’s gotten in, and tells her that Clint asked if she could take care of him while he’s gone, which is the first she hears of him being gone.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘how long’s he gone for?’

‘A few weeks,’ Coulson says, ‘we didn’t want to pull him in while you were gone, but it’s time-sensitive. He’ll be alright, don’t worry about him.’

‘I’m not worried about him,’ she says, ‘I’m worried about what I’m going to do while he’s gone. He’s my partner, you know.’

Coulson smiles, like she’s given him some big secret. He doesn’t offer her anything about said secret, and instead tells her that they’ll find something for her to do.

In the end, they give her a couple of rookies and send her on grunt-level missions to help train them up a bit. Field experience is hard at first, even on run-of-the-mill crooks and thugs, and she’s missed it. She shot up to Level Six. The rookies all want to know about Hawkeye.

‘I mean, you’re Hawkeye’s girl, right? Not his fake girl, but his real one.’

‘I’m his partner,’ Laura says, flipping through surveillance photos, printed out onto the cheapest photo paper imaginable. ‘If that’s what you mean.’

‘Nah,’ one of the rookies starts, ‘you’re his like, his – ‘

But the other one, a smart girl, barely in adulthood, and therefore a baby by Laura’s standards, shushes him by stamping on his foot.

‘What can you tell us about the photos?’ she asks, ‘did we do okay?’

Laura revels in the power she has over these baby agents, finds that she’s missed the lower-level work. Level Six gets into the grittier things, and being with Clint on Level Seven missions, she doesn’t often get to just sit around and take photos of mobsters drinking tea in coffee shops, because they like to be contrary. She’s missed it, but doesn’t miss the opportunity to tell them all the good and bad of their work, and what to do to improve.

It’s a successful mission, though, and Coulson is waiting for her in the lobby when they return to HQ.

‘You’re needed out there,’ he says, and Laura frowns, waves the rookies on to debrief.

‘What do you mean? Is he alright?’

‘He needs support on the ground, but I can’t spare the time.’

‘And I can? Send one of the Level Sevens.’

‘Laura, he won’t work with anyone else. We _tried_ sending someone else, and they’re coming home in a stretcher. He needs you out there, and we need him to get this mission under control.’

Laura sighs, rakes her hands through her hair. ‘Why me?’ she asks, ‘why not Bobbi?’

‘He can’t work with her,’ Coulson admits. ‘We – they had a couple missions, and it’s just – I don’t know what she sees in him, because he’s a pain in the ass.’

She runs a hand over her face, heaves another sigh. ‘You’ll have to take the dog back, I can’t leave him alone in the apartment, but sure, sure, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. Who do I see for briefing?’

‘Me,’ Fury says, and steps into her eyeline.

She must be slacking; she had no idea he was there at all.

‘Walk with me,’ he says, and turns on his heel, leaving Laura to rush to catch up.

They walk, and they talk, and Laura doesn’t want to do this mission any more than Fury wants to send her on it.

‘There’s a very real chance you’re going to have to get your hands dirty,’ he says, ‘and it’s very probable you’re going to get promoted on the far side.’

‘If I hadn’t already used all my leave, I’d say I wanted a holiday in payment,’ she says, ‘but that’s not fair on him.’

‘He’s been warned about his behaviour,’ Fury tells her.

‘He tried to kiss me,’ she blurts out.

‘Phil told me. I’ve spoken to him about it.’

She scoffs. ‘And what did you tell him?’

‘To let Morse go. I understand he’s refused to do that.’

‘We don’t talk about it,’ she says, ‘it’s the only thing he doesn’t share with me these days. And – well, she’s become such a big part of his life now that it leaves pretty big gaps in our conversations. I’m sorry, sir, I’ve done my best.’

‘You’ve done well,’ he assures her. ‘You aren’t to blame for what he does in his free time.’

Laura purses her lips, eyebrows knotting. ‘I don’t know,’ she hedges, ‘maybe I am. He’s – under all that bluster, he’s a good man, and I don’t think he does these things for the fun of it.’

‘No,’ Fury agrees, ‘but that doesn’t make it any more fun to deal with them. I’ll get Rumlow to fly you out tonight, he’s heading that way on another mission.’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll go home and pack.’

* * *

 

Rumlow tries to flirt with her the entire flight over. Well, he does flirt with her, very well in fact. He’s very charming, and if she was another woman, she might fall for it. But she tells him to keep his eyes on where he’s flying and not on the sports bra she’s wearing under her jumpsuit.

‘I can’t help it if Barton doesn’t know what he’s missing,’ Rumlow says, but turns back to the air in front of him all the same.

Laura pretends to not, at least in some deep internal part of her soul left hidden away from anyone who might look at it, agree with him.

* * *

 

Clint is –

Well, he’s unhappy to see her at the same time as being deliriously happy.

‘Thank God it’s you,’ he says, when she walks through the door of the safehouse. ‘I thought they were going to send someone fuckin’ useless.’

He’s exhausted, dark circles under his eyes and wired to hell – multiple espressos then, by the smell of him, and she just laughs and shakes her head and reaches up for a hug.

‘It’s just me,’ she says, ‘you’d better be planning to keep me safe, Agent Barton, there isn’t a replacement.’

‘No,’ he nods, into her ear. She can hear the buzz coming off his hearing aids from here. He inhales deep, smelling her skin, and the perfume on it. ‘No, I don’t think there is.’

They curl into a tight ball in the bed as soon as it’s dark outside, and Laura doesn’t even argue it, even though there’s a second bedroom with a second bed in it. Clint holds her tight, and snores against her shoulder. She hasn’t slept so well in months.

* * *

 

Clint is glad that Fury sent Laura. He couldn’t have coped if he’d sent someone – else. God forbid they send Bobbi. He hasn’t been avoiding her. But he’s been avoiding her.

 She met someone in the UK, he’s sure, some British agent or another. And he’s glad for it, he is. But he wishes she’d just talk to him. They’re both aware of what’s going on between them, and what they are, and yet he can’t just drop her, not without knowing there’s somewhere else for her to go first, for lack of a better phrasing. He likes her, genuinely so, and hopes she doesn’t hate him. He’d been doing his best, where he could. To make her happy, to make himself happy, to give them both the freedom that they seemed to so desperately want.

‘Just like your dad,’ he tells his reflection in the morning, as Laura potters about the safehouse, acquainting herself with the briefing and Clint’s investigation so far.

He’s in the bathroom, listening to her as closely as he can. If he was something more than a man, he might say he can hear her heart beat in time with the tap of her toes as she listens to the radio in the kitchen, playing one of the latest R’n’B hits. But he’s just a man, and he can only hear her humming and shuffling papers and padding across the linoleum to get the whistling kettle.

Splashing his face, and scrubbing gel into his cheeks and chin to get the shadow of his father shaved off his face, he decides to just –

It’s just Laura. He knows her like he knows the back of his hand, she won’t get him killed, and he won’t let her get into the line of fire.

* * *

 

Laura knows him better than anyone else, and works wonderfully, even as he asks her to get more and more out of her depth. This is a Level Seven operation. Level Eight, really, he shouldn’t be doing it, but they needed his eyes, and they fudged the numbers a little to make it happen. Fury does what Fury does, and they just get on with it. And she takes it in stride, she takes the getaway driving and the chokeholds and the racing up and down stairs and through corridors like an episode of Scooby Doo in stride. Clint only asks what she’s capable of, and she does the rest.

There are moments that he wonders if she’s going to step too far out of her comfortable position as a Level Six, if he’s going to break her with his demands, but then she puts the car into drive and whips it around a corner, and he settles.

‘Fuck this place,’ he tells her, as they tumble into the safehouse on the fourth night of the mission, already pulling at their bulletproofs and jumpsuits. ‘I can’t wait to get home.’

Laura, down to her knickers and easing the sports bra she wears on missions over her head, tosses a look over her shoulder.

‘If you want to watch Jerry Springer, I’ve got the cable tuned properly. I’m taking a bath.’

He gives her a few minutes, and then goes and flops down next to the tub in his boxers, head on the lip. Her fingers find his hair, and he dozes off to the smell of her bubble bath and the massage behind his ears.

She wakes him when she gets out of the tub, but he pretends to be asleep still, peeking through his eyelashes as she forgoes a towel to pad into the bedroom, returning in a bathrobe to wake him and get him into bed.

‘Nearly home,’ she murmurs to him, and he hates how cold his hand feels as soon as she’s let go.

* * *

 

Laura is gathering intelligence from the computer system of Clint’s – well, his target’s company. But it’s as good as his target, and she’s gathering intelligence from the computer when a man enters the room.

Clint is the other side of the building, getting a good workout from all the huffing and puffing and bellowed swearwords and gunfire going on in her earpiece, and she is alone. She has a floppy disk and a fax machine running, and she’s got the handgun on her hip – a stipulation from Clint.

‘I won’t be there physically,’ he’d told her as he forcibly strapped her into the holster, nearly yanking her off her feet when he tightened the thigh strap, ‘so you’ve got to have something I can trust.’

‘You trust a gun?’ she’d snorted, bracing herself against his shoulders as he argued with the buckle for the other thigh strap.

‘I trust you to make the right choice,’ he replies.

She flings herself over the table and under cover, fumbling with the popper for the gun at the same time as the man fumbles for his.

Neither of them had expected to see someone in the room, obviously, and Laura grips the pistol in both hands, takes deep breaths, waits for the man to start shooting.

‘I’m not looking to cause trouble!’ she tries, because it’s what Clint does.

It works as well for her as it does for him; it gives away which half of the table she’s hiding behind, and the first shot splinters the frontage next to her head. She rolls to the other side of the table, and sticks her head out from behind it, tries to get a line of sight and can’t. Mouthing curses, she shrugs and throws herself to her feet, firing blindly before diving for cover again.

This is very different to taking pot shots at people’s knees as she crawls for cover. This is a kill or be killed, and Clint has done his best to try and get her into a mindset to make the shot, but now that she’s here, facing a very real threat of death – she – she –

She finds that she can’t think, that she doesn’t know which way to go. There’s nowhere really for her to hide, because the table is only chipboard, and there’s only one door, and she’s on the fifth floor, she can’t dive out of a window. She isn’t Clint, she can’t parkour her way down the walls. But she can’t stay here either, if she stops shooting, she’s going to get killed, but she’s only got one clip.

Clint immediately starts hollering as the man empties his clip into the table.

‘Laura!’ he’s hollering, ‘Laura, are you alright? You still with the intel? Leg it, I’ll come to you!’

The man’s gun clicks, and Laura dithers long enough that he reloads, and starts shooting some more.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Clint is cursing in her ear, and Laura risks another couple of blind shots over her shoulder.

The table is splintering around her, and she has nowhere else to roll to.

The gun clicks again, and she makes a break for it. She goes for a shove at the man as she passes him, and he grabs her. They tumble, and she scratches at his face, kicking with her feet until his grip loosens enough for her to get free, and then she’s running, as fast as she can, along the corridor and down the stairs. The alarms are already blaring, people are running around, and she doesn’t dare question Lady Luck helping her avoiding getting caught in the crossfire.

Clint hits the underground garage at the same time she does, and they barrel into each other.

‘Are you alright?’ he asks, grabbing her face to study her wild eyes and tussled hair.

‘I’m okay,’ she nods, grabbing at his shoulders for stability. He’s broad and tall and a solid wall of muscle with his fucking arms out and she wants to touch those arms so badly. ‘I couldn’t do it – I know I had to – I had to shoot him but I couldn’t – I’m sorry – I had to and I – ‘

‘It’s alright,’ he promises, hurried, smoothing his hands over her face and hair, ‘you’re alive. We’ll – fuck, we’ll get out of here, and I’ll get you safe, and I’ll – I’ll come back, come on, before they catch up.’

He’s trying to hotwire a car when the doors burst open, and a dozen men tumble in.

‘Clint, we’ve got company!’

He curses, and turns to look at her yelling, only to clap eyes on a kick start motorcycle between him and the men rushing towards them. There’s a helmet hung on the handlebar, and he grabs Laura’s arm, drags her to it.

‘Put this on,’ he tells her, tossing it into her chest as he throws a leg over the bike, ‘and get on.’

She – for once in her blessed life – does as she’s told, and uses her knees to grip his hips as she fiddles with the helmet, and he kicks the bike into action just as the men finish pulling out their guns.

‘Hang on!’ he hollers, and Laura is unashamed to admit that she whoops instead of screams.

She always drives when they’re on missions, but Clint has always had control of motorcycles, refuses to be a pillion, even though he can’t ride and shoot at the same time, and she’s heard a few rumours that she’s the only person he’ll let drive him other than Coulson. She can’t exactly verify it, given that for the better part of the year, they’ve been working exclusively with each other, and when they haven’t been, Clint’s been flying solo or with Coulson, and that doesn’t lend itself to reliable evidence, but she can believe it. Clint’s a bitch of a passenger with her, never mind with anyone else.

‘Are you going to be alright without a helmet?’ she calls over the rushing of wind through her open visor, and Clint’s laugh gets caught in the breeze.

‘I’ll be fine, just hold on!’

He weaves them out of the garage and up the drive, out into the street. It’s the middle of the day, and people are bustling. Traffic is busy as always, and pedestrians holler and screech as he cuts through them. Laura looks over her shoulder; there are cars following them, blatantly so, and a couple of motorcycles besides.

‘We’ve still got company!’

He looks over his shoulder, swears up a storm, and nearly throws her off the bike putting his knee down to turn a sharp right. It takes them off the high street and she watches the directions overhead.

‘The highway?’ she asks, and he jerks his chin.

‘I’ll try and lose them on the big roads, and loop back, get you back to the house.’

‘So you can finish the job,’ she nods. ‘Sorry, I’m holding you back.’

‘You’re my priority,’ he tells her, and even with the wind hissing in the microphone of the earpiece, she can hear him loud and clear, and she gives him a squeeze, settles herself in against his back, holding on tight with her knees and fingers around his quiver straps.

‘You and your bow,’ she snorts, and he revs the engine, kicking the bike up a gear to get them further from the cars catching up.

It doesn’t take long to get them onto the highway, and they weave through the traffic, amid beeping horns and hollering drivers, and that’s where the shooting begins.

‘Clint, guns!’

‘Don’t let go,’ he replies, after a beat.

If she was someone else, she thinks, feeling her stomach lurch at how close some of his weaving is taking them to wing mirrors and truck wheels, he’d tell her to shoot back. But she isn’t someone else, and he’s doing his best. So she does her best and tries to read the shift of his hips between her legs, the twist of his chest under her hands, and predict which way she needs to lean with him.

‘I know you were in the circus!’ she hollers, ‘but you’re not a stunt rider!’

‘Who says?’ he scoffs, and kicks them away from a car that’s too close, much to the screeching horn of the car and driver both. ‘I’ll do what I want.’

‘As long as it doesn’t kill us, sure!’ she scoffs back.

How he avoids killing anyone, she doesn’t know, because the guns and the bikers are getting a little close for comfort, but he throws them over the hatchings into the exit for a turning, and then onto a ramp that takes them to the other side of the intersection. The jolt of the landing has her ass leaving the seat and bruising her tailbone on hitting the seat again, but she barely feels the pain for the judder in her legs and the adrenaline keeping her knuckles white.

‘You alright?’

‘I’m alive,’ she replies, and he weaves them through an industrial estate and under an overpass.

In the shadow of construction, he kills the engine and pats her knee. She dismounts, and pulls the helmet off, shaking her hair out as he gets off the bike too, shaking his legs out. They listen to the road above them for a long moment, and then look at each other. Clint’s face is red-raw with the wind, and Laura’s hair is a rat’s nest, and they’re breathing hard, and they’re so close Laura can see his pulse jumping in his neck, even when he swallows.

The moment catches, and holds, and she licks her lips, finds herself terrified for all the wrong reasons. He reaches for her face, holds it like the finest glass, and she tilts her chin, just a little.

But he doesn’t kiss her. Not her lips, anyway. He kisses her forehead, lingers long enough that her stomach twists with the wish he’d kissed her mouth, and then he’s pulling away.

‘Come on, I’d better get you back. You got most of the intel, right? You might as well get on a flight back home in the morning. Call Coulson when you’re back, and he’ll arrange it.’

‘You – ‘

‘I’ll finish up here. Just a few of them left to take out, and the power vacuum will deal with the rest.’

She sighs, closes her eyes, nods.

‘Stay safe,’ she tells him.

‘I’m glad you’re alive,’ he replies, and jams the helmet back on her head.

* * *

 

Bobbi is waiting to pick her up from the airport.

‘I’m going back to England,’ she tells her, as she helps Laura get her bags into the car.

‘I didn’t know you’d been,’ Laura admits.

‘Clint didn’t tell you? It’s what he was sulking about over Christmas, at least part of it. I mean, he was mostly sulking that you’d gone to visit your dad, but then I was gone too, and you know how he is. But yeah, I went to England and I – I, uh. I met someone.’

‘I see.’

Laura really wishes Clint had kissed her now. She’s probably missed her chance.

‘I haven’t – done anything. With him.’

‘But you’d like to?’

‘He’s very handsome.’

‘I see.’

Bobbi eyes her. ‘I thought you’d be happy. It means you get Clint back to yourself.’

Laura knows she’s teasing, can hear it in her voice and in the shit eating grin on her face, but she purses her lips anyway.

‘He’s never been just to myself. I don’t own him.’

‘You’re like an old married couple,’ Bobbi snorts. ‘You pair his socks for him, and I know it was you, because they were paired when I first stepped foot in his apartment, and then they stopped being paired.’

‘I put them into pairs,’ Laura says, ‘that doesn’t mean I make them match.’

Bobbi snorts, and then swears at a cabbie cutting her off. ‘I wanted to tell him in person, you know. So there’s no bad blood. But he’s still out there, huh.’

‘Got a few loose ends to clean up.’

‘You did well, they’ll make a Seven out of you, yet. You want to be careful, else Fury’ll start eyeing you up for Director.’

Laura would shove her if she wasn’t driving.

* * *

The thing about being a Level Seven of Clint’s calibre, the thing about having a distinctive murder method, the whole gimmick thing, the being a handsome baby-faced boy from Iowa with a penchant for purple and terrible life choices, the thing about it is it makes you very easily identifiable.

And the thing with being easily identifiable is that those who are close to you are also easily identifiable, and they become a primary target.

Laura doesn’t know that her apartment is bugged, and she doesn’t know that her windows are watched. She doesn’t know it, and she’ll never know it. Nobody thinks about these things, nobody thinks that hey, Laura is readily touted as the priority of the newly-minted Hawkeye’s life, his number one, his favourite person in the world second to his dog, and nobody is stupid enough to go after his dog.

His woman, on the other hand – his real woman, mind, the one that made him into the one-eighty pound monster of bow string scars and espresso shots – she’s fair game.

That’s the problem with being a superhero-in-the-making. You make enemies, and they’re not afraid to play dirty.

* * *

 

Clint comes home, and Laura is waiting for him, with pizza and the dog, and her pyjamas are made of his jogging bottoms and one of his t-shirts and her fuzziest bed socks.

‘I didn’t run you a bath,’ she apologises, ‘I thought you’d like to eat first.’

He dumps his bow and quiver and bulletproof on the floor. He kicks off his boots, and he throws his keys in the bowl on the counter. He touches her face, traces her eyebrows and her nose and the dip under her lips. He’d kiss her, if he could. He wants to, she wants him to, they both must know it.

But he just rests their foreheads together and hugs her tight, and tells her he’s glad she’s alive.

He runs a bath, and makes her wash his back, because he’s black and blue beneath his equipment, and she’s happy to do so, scrubbing at the dust in his hair too, rubbing at his shoulders and thumbing the knots at the base of his neck.

‘Shame we ain’t dating,’ he slurs, after the massage has got him loose and sleepy. ‘You could get in the bath too.’

‘Don’t be dirty,’ she says.

‘I’m not,’ he assures her, and pats her arm with a damp hand. ‘I’m in the bath. There’s soap in here somewhere.’

‘Filth,’ she accuses, and tweaks his ear. ‘Get cleaned up, Hawkeye, and get to bed.’

‘Will you be waiting?’ he asks, as she gets to her feet to walk away.

She glances over her shoulder, and smiles. He’s in love with her. He admits that. But that smile makes him very glad the bubbles are still in full force.

‘If you’re lucky,’ she teases.


	6. How to Perform a Rescue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laura has a no good, very bad, really awful week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for non graphic violence

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Clint Barton does not deal well with changes that haven’t been run past him in three unread letters, two unanswered phone calls, and a forgotten conversation first. Not so universally acknowledged is that his inability to handle change stems predominantly from his fear of being left behind and forgotten and becoming obsolete in a grander scheme. He is, after all, a grown man without a high school diploma, whose main gimmick is to fire a bow and arrow and think it’s somehow more proficient than just using a damned gun, who can barely read (though, in his later years, when Laura has had quite enough of his nonsense, she will tell him to go to a specialist and the word _dyslexia_ will suddenly make things make so much more sense) and who is _deaf_. These are not practical things for a grown man to be associated with, and so, to Clint, it is only a matter of time before he is replaced.

However, there is a change Laura has made that he is not so bitter and broken up about; she’s made him _happy_ , and that’s a good change, no matter the suddenness of it.

He has contented himself with the knowledge that he’s missed his chance with her, that in another world, she’d have said yes to him, and that they could be married by now. Because they would be, he knows they would, because he knows what’s what, and how he feels is the way he thinks marriages are made forever out of.

So they’re friends again, but the friends of _Before_ ; before Bobbi and the head-bashing and the almost-kiss. The friends they’re most comfortable being, and the cogs turn as they should. Fury bumps Laura up to a temporary Level Seven, so that she can better assist him when Coulson isn’t around, but Clint is happier dropping down to Level Six missions to keep her company. There’s some vague discussion of maybe getting them as a trainer team, working with the rookies. Clint doesn’t think he’s ready for grunt work again, but he’s willing to throw his two cents in, if they ask. And it’d make Laura happy, which has become his priority again, the way he never intended it to not be.

And so they do their thing, working and eating and going for drinks on a Friday night and singing awful pop songs that will make their future adopted children cringe at the lyrics, sleeping in the same bed and using each other as tables and chairs, patching wounds and having the late night conversations that only agents who have Seen Some Shit can have. They co-exist in a way that most people dream of co-existing; separately, and yet together at the seams, in each other’s pockets while not seeing each other for days on end. It’s a peculiar existence. Laura has a work dress and a going out dress and a pair of shorts in Clint’s wardrobe, a little box of toiletries on a shelf in his bathroom, her favourite tea in the kitchen cupboard. He has an entire drawer of her dresser devoted to his unworn boxer shorts and his mismatched socks and his work trousers. It’s a life they’re comfortable living, and Clint finds he doesn’t need to be in it every second of every day to know that it’ll still be there when he turns around.

Even though it takes him past HQ, Clint will go and call on Laura in the morning, and he does it every morning they’re both due in, or when they’re both off duty. If he’s on and she’s off - or the other way around, both as rare an occurrence as the other – he’ll leave her be, either asleep or letting her sleep, and they’ll meet after work instead. It’s such a reliable routine that everyone is surprised Clint doesn’t have a key to Laura’s place yet.

They’ve tossed the idea around, a little bit. Vaguely, in that way people vaguely toss ideas about when they want it but aren’t sure they should. He knows where her spare key is, wedged behind the number plaque for her apartment door, but he always knocks first.

He knocks first now, a rat-a-tat-tat that is exclusively his knock, so that she knows to just let him in. They both have the day off, and she’d agreed on the phone last night that they’d go out for breakfast and he’d help her build a set of shelves to replace the ones that had been warped by her books.

‘Laura?’ he calls, when she doesn’t answer.

He flicks the wheel behind his ear, turns his volume up. He can’t hear water running, to indicate she’s in the shower. She doesn’t sleep in unless she’s sick, and she hadn’t been feeling under the weather for a while. She doesn’t suffer from hayfever, even though it’s prime season for pollen right now.

So he knocks again.

And again.

‘Laura!’ he calls, ‘are you awake?’

She wouldn’t have gone out without him; if something came up, she’d always let him know, and she’d have left him a note, if she hadn’t gotten him on the phone.

Pursing his lips, he knocks again. Her neighbour opens the door, and asks what’s wrong.

‘She’s not gone out, has she, do you know?’ he asks.

‘No, she was up this morning, I heard her moving about, but I didn’t hear the door go. Sorry, dude.’

 ‘Cheers,’ he says, and the neighbour retreats inside.

He goes down to the lobby to use the communal phone.

‘Hey, it’s Hawkeye,’ he says when the girl on reception answers.

‘Hey,’ she replies. Maggie, she’s one of Laura’s friends, and Laura’s friends aren’t daft, so she asks, ‘what’s the matter?’

‘Laura’s not answering her door,’ he says, ‘she’s not come in, has she?’

‘It’s her day off,’ Maggie hedges, and he can hear her tapping. ‘Let me just see if she’s signed in anywhere – no, no, she’s not been flagged on any of the doors or computers. Maybe she’s sleeping in?’

‘Her neighbour says he heard her up and about. Eh, I’ll let myself in with the spare key.’

‘Alright,’ Maggie says, ‘let me know if she’s sick or whatever, if she’s that bad she won’t be able to call in.’

‘Will do.’

The spare key is gone.

Clint goes back to the lobby.

‘It’s me again,’ he says when Maggie picks up. ‘The spare key’s gone, and she’s not answering at all. I’m going to kick the door down.’

‘We can send a locksmith,’ Maggie tells him.

‘In this traffic? It was quicker for me to walk from the subway. Nah, I’ll kick it in, just send someone to replace it.’

Maggie calls him a very rude name, and hangs up.

He trots back up the stairs to Laura’s door, and listens one last time.

‘Please just have the flu,’ he prays to the non-existent gods that are currently trying his patience, and kicks the door open.

* * *

 

‘Do you know why you’re here?’

‘Kiss my ass,’ Laura spits back.

The knuckles that collideswith her cheek nearly crack her cheekbone. She grits her teeth.

‘I’ll ask again; do you know why you’re here?’

‘Why wouldn’t you let me put any shoes on?’ she counters.

Gritting her teeth doesn’t stop the squeal of pain this time as the knuckles collide again with her cheek.

* * *

 

Laura’s apartment is –

Well, to be frank, it’s a fucking mess. It’s not just a _mess_ , the way that it can be a mess when she’s been left to her own devices for too long, but it’s a _fucking mess_. The kind of mess you only get when some shit’s gone down and nobody’s been around to clear it up. Her furniture is trashed, there’s blood everywhere, her standing lamp is broken. There are knife marks in the couch and her gun is nowhere to be seen. It’s not _really_ her gun; it’s Clint’s, kept there for emergency purposes, and she’d obviously decided this was an emergency worth getting it, but it’s not to be found, and there’s no way it being fired wouldn’t have been noticed. Laura likes this apartment, even though it’s in a less than perfect area, because it’s full of mostly old people and quiet professionals who don’t have loud parties and raucous sex. It means it’s a quiet building, and a gunshot would absolutely have been heard.

‘Fuck sake,’ Clint says, because he can’t even shut the door now to go back to the lobby.

By some small mercy, her landline is still active. The phone is off the stand and off the hook, but it’s still going, so he dials into reception again.

‘Me again,’ he says, before Maggie’s even started her greeting. ‘I need to be put through to Fury.’

‘He’s in a meeting with the council.’

‘Maggie,’ he says, and she sighs.

‘I don’t want to know,’ she says, and he can hear her tapping, ‘don’t tell me anything. Okay, give me a second.’

He goes onto hold for a minute, and he taps his foot to Vivaldi until the line connects.

‘Barton,’ Fury says, ‘I’m told this is important.’

‘Laura’s been taken from her apartment,’ Clint replies. ‘The place is trashed, there’s blood. I need forensics and the paperwork for the mission to be filed.’

‘Taken?’ Fury asks, and then sighs. ‘Give me two seconds.’

 He goes back onto hold, and Clint heaves a sigh.

‘Barton, forensics are on their way. Do you have any information?’

‘I’ll work on it.’

He hangs up, and then rocks onto his toes, bends his knees, and starts creeping about the apartment, bending and twisting and turning to look at every little thing he can see, examining and considering.

‘So you didn’t open the door,’ he says, ‘they knew the spare key was there.’

The chain had been snapped prior to his entrance; it had been something he registered in the back of his mind but not really thought about, too concerned with what else he was seeing. They’d broken the chain; bolt cutters, maybe. Her keys were still on the side. He stops and thinks and thinks and somewhat manages to create what seems a reasonable reconstruction of events. Laura is not a coward, but she’s not particularly skilled at the whole fighting malarkey. She’d be able to defend herself for at least a short while, and it looks very much like she did; he’s willing to bet barely any of the blood is hers. He’ll have to wait for forensics, and he doesn’t think he has time, really. He needs to find out who took her and where.

It’s as forensics are walking through the door that he finds the thing he needed; a clue.

It’s the most typical clue he could have found to boot. A matchbook from a club in Atlanta.

‘Atlanta,’ he says, to the poor fucker on forensics today, knowing they’ve had the barest briefing and are expecting to face to devil.

He can’t blame them. He’s gained something of a reputation now, after breaking a level five’s nose for not stopping flirting with Laura when she told him to stop. And that’s to say nothing of the brawls he’s gotten into with Rumlow over the girl. To see her taken, no wonder forensics are shitting themselves.

‘Atlanta,’ forensics replies, and Clint nods, bites the back of his lip.

‘I need to get my kit,’ he says, ‘don’t touch her stuff.’

‘We kind of have to,’ forensics mumbles as Clint strides for the door and he shows some degree of maturity by not reacting to them.

* * *

 

The room is small, and dark, and there is only the faintest sliver of light coming from beneath the door. Laura is in pain, and she cannot think much beyond it.

‘Why?’ she screeches, when the silence gets to be too much. ‘Why the fuck is it me?’

The door bangs, to silence her, and she flinches at the noise rattling across her brain.

She’s hungry and thirsty and tired and the pain can’t be localised, spread too wide across her limbs and core and head. Her head is pounding, and the rattling of the door nearly takes her out.

A snarl in the back of her throat, and she takes a deep breath, two, three. Clint taught her better than this.

‘Clint,’ she breathes, ‘fuck.’

He’s not going to be able to find her, she’s sure of that; they were too good about getting her out. There won’t be clues. Shit.

‘Sorry, babe,’ she breathes.

* * *

 

In the months leading up to this dire day, Laura had been down in R&D, and had been playing around with Clint’s gear, the way that he’d given her exclusive written permission to do. She’s not technically qualified as textiles, but she’s got common sense, and when she calls him out on his bullshit, he listens to her. Girls know more about this kind of bullshit than anyone else, so he lets her do what she wants.

Recently, she’s been playing with his body armour, and it’s to the R&D lab rats that he heads now, racing down the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. It takes two goes to get his ID to register on the scanner, because he doesn’t put it square on the screen, and the poor bastards inside blink stupidly at him over their computers and desks.

‘Agent Barton,’ says Janine, one of the lead textiles girls, from the far side of the room. ‘Laura said she’d send you down this week, we’ve got the next prototype for you to test out.’

He looks at her for a second too long, and she stops walking towards him.

‘What’s happened?’ she asks.

‘I need my gear,’ he says, ‘whatever state it’s in. I need it.’

‘Well,’ she says, and wrings her hands, ‘it’s still in its initial stages, we haven’t run any advanced tests on it to see if it’s fully bulletproof yet.’

(The lack of stable bullet-proofing is going to be a running theme in Clint’s gear, he thinks. In twenty years, in less than a week, he will be shot twice in the same place, and it will destroy both sets of his armour, leading to becoming made of plastic, and then massive scarring he refuses to get rid of the way he did the rest.)

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says, because it doesn’t. ‘No better time to test it than on the field.’

Janine wrings her hands some more, but Clint is doing that bigger-man thing and he’s not _meaning_ to bully her with his general presence, but he’s bullying her into taking him to his gear by just taking a couple of steps forward and stretching his neck to look past her.

‘Agent – Clint, listen,’ she says, as she leads him down a twisty corridor to a display case, where his gear hangs on a mannequin, looking very much like Laura’s had something to do with it; it’s purple for a start. ‘I don’t know what’s happened, and I don’t want to know, it’ll only make me worry more. Just promise me she’ll come back in one piece.’

‘If she doesn’t, they won’t either,’ he promises her, and gestures. ‘My gear. Please.’

She helps him strap himself in – Laura wasn’t exactly intuitive about where she placed the zips and buckles, and maybe in another life he’d have made a joke about her helping him get into it, but this is not that life and he just shrugs the shoulder plates into place – and hands him an empty quiver.

‘We don’t keep arms down here, but this quiver should have strong enough magnets to stay attached onto your back plate, just don’t go near any strong magnetic fields.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ he says.

‘We’re working on defining the polarity,’ she says, and she starts walking him back to the door. ‘So that it’s a stable magnetic field that doesn’t get interrupted. But the boys in the physics labs won’t let us test it.’

‘I’ll have a word,’ he says, meaninglessly. What he means is; he’ll tell Fury the boys are being mean again, and Fury will go and stare at them until they let the girls do what they do.

Topside again, he goes to the armoury, gets his arrows, gets a handgun and spare clips, and goes to Fury’s office. The rookies see him in full gear, goggles atop his head, boots a whisper on the floor, and they jerk out of his way, but the whispers follow him.

‘I’m going,’ he says, before the door’s even fully open.

Coulson is in a jumpsuit, a bag by his feet. Fury is standing on the other side of his desk, looking stern. It’s his general expression, but Clint can see the differences, if he looks hard enough.

‘I’m coming too,’ Coulson says, ‘you’ll need support. I’ve got a medic on the plane ready.’

‘I don’t need support,’ Clint says, and turns on his heel.

Coulson grabs his bag and hurries after his agent. ‘You do, and I’m not going to argue with you, Clint. You’re going to need help, and I’ve got clearance to provide it. What else would we do? Send Rumlow in when you’re over your head? Don’t embarrass us like this. We’ve got a job to do, and we’re going to do it. As a team. One of our number is down, and we’re getting her back.’

Clint’s belly turns over.

‘Team,’ he repeats, numb.

‘Team, exactly. Laura’s integral to getting all this working, and I’m not going to waste our time debating it. Let’s go, Agent Barton, we’ve got a bar in Atlanta to raid.’

* * *

 

It turns out the bartenders are very eager to talk when Clint jabs a survival knife into the bar half an inch from the poor bastard’s wrist.

‘Yeah, they’re those kind of regulars you don’t know a lot about,’ the boy sweats. ‘Come in all the time, but you don’t know their names. Always pay in cash, never cause a problem, keep to themselves in the corner.’

‘You didn’t hear anything?’

‘I heard – well, you hear little things, but I didn’t hear enough, I don’t think, for it to be useful. They were talking about something that happened in Illinois, they kept talking about Illinois, about how they had to get payback, and going – and I quote – “for the bitch” – I’m quoting! Don’t look at me like that! That’s what they said. That that would be easier than going for him. I don’t know who he is. But they weren’t happy with him. I thought it was just frat boy shit, so I left it alone.’

‘Do you have cameras?’ Clint asks. ‘On the door?’

‘Yes,’ the boy says, ‘but I don’t have access to it, only management does.’

‘Then,’ Coulson says, gently, his nails pressing tight into the underside of Clint’s arm, ‘can I suggest you call them?’

‘Who do I say’s asking?’ the boy asks, because this is the first time he’s thought to ask, generally too taken aback by a man with a quiver on his back demanding to know about a group of men in the bar in the last few nights.

‘Government,’ Coulson says, because S.H.I.E.L.D. would take too long to explain.

‘Okay, um. Do you have badges?’

Clint grinds the knife a little deeper, and the boy nods, apologises, and hurries to the phone.

‘We don’t have _time_ for this bullshit,’ Clint snarls, and Coulson’s nails draw blood.

‘We do what we have to do,’ he replies. ‘Quit your whining, or we’ll never find her.’

The manager has no patience, but neither does Clint, so one of them has to leave the situation.

So while Coulson’s doing his diplomatic sweet-talking bullshit, Clint takes to the rooftops, and tries to think of where Laura could be.

‘All this over Chicago,’ he mutters to himself, and balances on his toes on the edge of a roof, looking out over the city, his chin in his hands and elbows on knees.

Laura would make a joke about him looking like a bird, perched there like that, if she were here to see him. The thought that she might never be here to see him again makes something deep in his belly turn.

His throat closes up, his eyes itch, his chest twists. A pounding behind his eyes and he rocks his weight back onto his heels, drops back off the lip and onto the roof proper, staggering to the air conditioning vent and throwing up beside it. He stands there, tears in his eyes, and breathes deep.

‘She’s going to be okay,’ he tells himself. ‘She has to be.’

* * *

 

Laura is not okay.

* * *

 

It takes them a week to track her down.

They wouldn’t have been able to do it at all if they hadn’t stumbled across a drug ring on the way through, and one of the thugs had a matchbook from that same club. Clint, at the end of his tether where patience for investigating was concerned, had grabbed the poor fool by his throat and slammed him into a solid surface and not let go until he had answers.

‘I knew there was more to this,’ he says later, as Coulson drives them down the highway and across state lines.

‘So you kept saying.’

‘And I was right.’

‘Am I ever going to hear the end of this?’ Coulson asks, and cuts someone up.

He never cuts people up, but Clint has been watching his knuckles get whiter and whiter throughout the week; he’s as stressed and worried and high-strung as Clint it, but he supposes the older agent isn’t powered by love or whatever bullshit they’ll no doubt use as a cover for why they’ve gone kind of not really rogue. Fury’s given them the okay to go find her, but not to get her. They’ll worry about how they’re going to explain all this mess they’ve left behind later, when they know where Laura stands. Or sits. Or lies. When they know where she is, and how she is, they’ll worry about the rest then.

Clint doesn’t answer, and that’s answer enough.

They don’t speak again until they’re over state lines and pulling into an empty car lot in Denver.

* * *

 

Laura becomes aware, in some vague, distorted way, of noise. It’s not noise that she recognises, but she knows it. In her bones, something shifts, probably another fragment shifting against the grind of the rest of it. She lies there and stares at nothing, because the room is dark, and there’s nothing for her eyes to adjust to. It’s barren of anything; a bed, a piss-pot, a discernible brickwork.

The noise continues, and it bounces behind her eyes, rattling like struck metal.

She puts her head back down; there’s no point trying to work any of it out. It’s just some power struggle, there’s been three already.

* * *

 

Clint’s hands are wet by the time he reaches the bottom of the stairs, and he stands there fruitlessly wiping them off on his trousers. It doesn’t get him very far, and just smears blood all over himself like war paint.

‘This is my fault,’ he tells Coulson, who is following him down the stairs at a slower pace.

Wise, considering he’s going backwards to cover Clint’s back.

‘Hardly,’ Coulson replies, even though it _is_ Clint’s fault, in so much as people choosing to target those he loves as a way to lure him out is his fault. ‘You’re good at your job, and we have confirmation she’s alive.’

It had been the most harrowing part of the whole ordeal. In one of the offices, left open and unguarded by a fool clearly too comfortable in his own wickedness, they’d found photographs and a VHS labelled with _RANSOM._

Clint had been able to stomach the first three seconds, and had taken off down the corridor as soon as it became clear what was happening. He’ll file everything under his name, use his insurance to get her fit and healthy again, because this is _his fault_. She’s going to be _fucked_ by this, and he wouldn’t blame her if she never wanted to see him again. But he’ll get it all covered under his policies, and she’ll have the best care anybody could ever want. She’ll never have to work another day in her life, the care he’s going to get for her.

Fuck sake.

* * *

 

Laura is still lying there when there’s an enormous, colossal, earth-shattering (or at least, earth-rattling) bang. A second passes, and then with a silent creak, the door to her cage falls open and the faint stirrings of daylight creep across the floor. It takes her a solid three minutes to adjust to this change in circumstances, and even longer to find some kind of energy to get herself moving.

Standing is – not an option.

But she gets herself onto her elbows, which is more than nothing, and enough to get her moving. A little bit anyway. If she can get to the door, she can use the frame to get more upright, and then she can work out where she’s going from there.

The world has gone eerily quiet since the bang. She wonders if she’s deaf, but no, she can hear her fingers scrabbling for purchase on the floor, and, slowly, distant yelling, getting closer.

They’ve realised what the power outage means, and they’re coming for her.

She wonders if they know what it means, really, beneath the immediate realisation that the door is open. She wonders if they know what the theatrics of blowing the entire building’s power – and probably taking the block with it, the way that bang echoed – means. She wonders if they know who’s in the building with them.

Clint is a show-off, but he is not in the business of fucking around.

She wonders who’s going to see who first. Them, her, him. She wonders if he’s alone. She doesn’t know what answer she wants to that pondering.

* * *

 

The darkness doesn’t bother Clint; Coulson made sure he came equipped. Clint would have come with his kit and his bow and not thought any further than that. But Coulson’s a smart fellow, and brought Clint’s goggles so that he has night-vision and, therefore, has no trouble navigating the now-blackened underground area of the building.

Between the screaming and the shouting and the disarray, it takes him longer than it would have if he was free to just move. Instead, he’s got to deal with people. And he doesn’t have any patience to do that.

The corridors start to look the same, and he wonders if he’s just going in circles, but then he turns another corner and he sees an open door.

In the space of two heartbeats, the world condenses to that few square feet, and he stops dead, Coulson barely able to stop behind him.

‘Hawkeye,’ he says, and Clint’s hand comes up.

Stop, look, listen.

Coulson does as directed, and falls back a step, giving Clint room.

* * *

 

There’s only the faintest light, but her eyes adjust, and she sits against the door frame, doing breathing exercises that don’t really help but make her feel better for at least trying to do them. It doesn’t help the pain, but it’s something to do, and focusing on it almost helps her focus on actually thinking. Almost.

Deep breath one, two, three, and her eyes have adjusted enough that she can make out the emptiness of the corridor, the silence in her immediate area. There’s screaming and shouting further away; above ground, maybe, or in a different part of the floor, but not here. Not in this corridor. She’s totally alone, and for the first time, she’s kind of glad for it.

She wonders if she could make even an attempt for a break for it, whether her legs would last long enough to get her out of the door, if her constitution was strong enough.

And then the decision is made for her, the door at the end of the corridor swinging open and noise following it.

She breathes some more, one, two, three, deep and hard.

And then –

And _fucking then_ –

The most blessed sound in the world.

‘Hawkeye,’ Coulson says, and the silence echoes like a scream.

‘Clint,’ she croaks, because she can’t not, and she’s scrambling against the pain, using the frame to try and get her legs under her, but the pain is too much.

She’s crying before her foot is flat on the floor, but it doesn’t matter, warm, broad hands are grabbing her arms, touching her face, her hair, her shoulders and neck and ribs and hands and legs and everywhere that there is to touch, the hands are there. A masked face swims in and out of her vision, blurred by the tears, twisted by the weight of her broken bones, and she sobs harder.

‘Clint,’ she begs, but doesn’t know what she’s begging for.

‘I’ve got you,’ he breathes back, sounding so close that it might as well be in an earpiece buried in her brain, and his fingers brush her cheeks.

His head bumps against hers, a dull thump of bone and hair and exertion-warm skin, and she clutches at whatever she can reach. He’s wearing his gear, his full kit. It’s not ready, she knows it’s not ready, but he’s wearing it, and she breathes the smell of him in.

* * *

 

When Laura opens her eyes, she’s blinded by the sunlight streaming through the wide, open window to her left. She screws her face up and groans, raises an aching arm to try and block some of the sun. Everything hurts, her arm lead-heavy, and she lets it flop back onto the mattress when keeping it up seems too much effort.

‘Laura? Laura, oh thank God, you’re awake.’

A shadow falls across her and she manages to peel her eyes open again to find Clint stood in front of the window, leaning over her and blocking the worst of the sun. He looks like shit, all red-raw eyes and pale mouth, his hair flat against his head and his stubble out of control.

‘You look terrible,’ she croaks, and he laughs, touches her face with his fingertips.

‘So do you,’ he says, and brushes some hair from her temple. ‘I need to tell the doctors you’re awake.’

‘What happened?’ she asks, watching the storm-blue of his eyes searching the autumn-gold of hers. ‘I remember the – my apartment – I remember a – a fight. But then it’s – where am I?’

‘You’re in a hospital in Nashville. You got – kidnapped, I guess? Taken. From your apartment, and you put up a fight, you fought your ass off. But when we caught up to them, and to you, it didn’t matter how much of a fight you’d put up. I – there were a few moments, getting you out of that – that place – where we were sure we were going to lose you. They won’t come for you again.’

‘Dead?’

‘Dead. I really need to get the doctors. I want to get you back to New York as soon as I can, or at the least, the Academy. I won’t be long.’

He flicks her nose and disappears out of the door. Laura lies there and stares at the space he’d just vacated and feels the vague sensation of his arms around her, across her back and under her knees, the warmth of him against her side.

When he returns, a doctor in tow, she blinks up at him, reaches for his hand.

‘You carried me,’ she says, ‘you – I remember being carried.’

He smiles. ‘You weren’t fit to walk, so one of us had to carry you, and I didn’t trust anyone else to do it right.’

She smiles, and then gasps when the doctor sticks a cold as fuck thermometer in her ear.

‘Just making sure all your vitals are normal,’ the doctor says. ‘You’ve been through the wringer, Agent, and we want to make sure you’re all set to be transferred back to HQ. It’s a long journey.’

‘I’ve made worse,’ she says, and frowns at Clint.

‘He’s one of ours,’ Clint tells her, ‘you should have seen his face when we brought you in.’

The doctor snorts. ‘You should have seen _Barton’s_ face when he brought you in. I’ve never seen a man fight so hard to keep his composure before. I’m surprised you aren’t bruised, he was holding that tight.’

‘She was bleeding.’

‘Not where you were holding her, she wasn’t. Harcourt, open up.’

Laura obligingly opens her mouth, and says ‘ah’ when told. The doctor runs all the other tests he could possibly run, checking her eyesight and her hearing and her comprehension, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, and once, Clint asks if he wants a pee sample too, which makes Laura laugh until she’s coughing.

The doctor is unimpressed, but says that a urine sample might not be a bad idea.

‘We did blood tests, obviously,’ he says, tapping a pen against his mouth, ‘but we could do with running tests on a urine sample, just to make sure there’s nothing else in your system.’

Laura looks at Clint, who looks too innocent to not have thought about this and suggested it for that very reason.

‘Better safe than sorry,’ he says cheerfully, and offers to help Laura up.

‘You are not watching me pee,’ she says. ‘I know we share a lot of things, but for crying out loud.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ he protests, and finds the blankets to pull them off her, helping her guide her feet to the floor. ‘I said I’d help you up. You’ve been out for a week, honey; you aren’t standing unaided any time soon.’

Laura wiggles her toes and grabs the IV stand, lets Clint tuck his hands under her arms and ease her onto her feet. It’s not the first time he’s helped her stand, but she’s never been – never been –

‘What exactly happened to me?’ she asks, because the answer hadn’t been much good the first time, and tests her weight on her feet.

Her knees begin to buckle, so Clint tightens his grip and holds her up.

‘From what we could gather,’ he says, in that hedging sort of way where he doesn’t really want to tell her anything, and steps around her to change his grip, scooping her up, ‘you were attacked in your apartment. You were a state; there was blood. It should all heal over nicely, in time. If you rest. We don’t know the details of what happened. As soon as the Doc says you can go, I’m taking you home.’

‘You said that,’ she says, and tucks her legs in so he can fit her and her IV through the door to the bathroom. ‘You said you wanted me back in New York as soon as possible.’

‘I know New York,’ he says, ‘and your apartment’s trashed, but I thought – I thought once you were allowed out of HQ’s infirmary, maybe you could – stay with me?’

She feels something curl in her belly at that, and it bubbles up her throat at the same time as she manages to choke out that she’s going to chuck, so he leans her over the shower stall rather than the toilet, and doesn’t even complain when she throws up on his shoes.

* * *

 

Getting clean is –

Well, it’s not as mortifying as she thought it might have been.

There are perfectly qualified staff to help her, but Clint insists on being the one to do so, and she doesn’t argue with him, doesn’t complain or interject or say a word; she daren’t. The look on his face is not one for arguments, and she recognises the undercurrent of emotion there.

Guilt, because she got taken and injured and she’s under his watch, under his care, and he promised her, months ago, that nothing would happen to her, that he’d never let it. And here she is, injured and overdue a breakdown, but she’s bottling it for when he’s gone, when he can’t see her do it, and she knows it’s not healthy, but he’s also not a therapist, or a psychologist, or a counsellor, or any sort of mental-wellness sort of staff.

He’ll learn what happened, of course he will, they’ll tell him, because he’ll make it such a problem to not tell him, it’s the way he is. And he’ll get even deeper into this guilt train he’s riding on, and she can’t bear to have him not able to look at her.

So she lets him help her clean up, even if it’s not exactly the way she wanted him to see her properly naked. Oh, he’s seen her naked, but fleeting glimpses between the bubbles in a bathtub, or as she walks away to get changed out of mission gear, that’s not the same as battered and bruised and cast-up, needing help just to sit on the toilet, never mind wash her back.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, because she can’t help herself.

‘Never say that again,’ he replies, and that’s the end of that.

* * *

 

It takes a few days for the doctors to be sure enough of her stability (what little of it they believe to be real, anyway) to allow her to travel again. Coulson stopped by the first day, congratulated her on being alive, told her he was glad of it, and that there nearly destroyed her, but she bit her lip and nodded and thanked him for being there, and he’d gone back to file the reports and do all the boring details, leaving Clint behind with her. Not that there was any other way it was going to happen, of course, but he didn’t even try to argue it.

Which was nice.

Clint’s been simultaneously a godsend and the bane of her life, the last couple days. He’s been fantastic in taking care of her, but he’s been so far up the doctors’ asses she’s surprised they can’t taste their own shit, demanding to know what they’re doing every step of the way. It’s impeded them, to some degree, but they must be used to this kind of feral behaviour from male agents where their female partners are concerned, because they deal with him with far more poise and calmness than she gives him when he helps her hobble to the bathroom for the fifth time that hour.

‘I reckon Fury’s called,’ he says on the third night, when she can’t sleep, and doesn’t want to take the meds that put her out. ‘And told them what was up.’

She suspects the same, but doesn’t give him the ego boost.

‘Perhaps,’ she says instead, and reaches for his hand. ‘Thank you. For being here.’

‘You’re going to be alright,’ he says, with a fervent intensity that makes her shiver. ‘Are you cold? Here, I’ll – blanket or air con?’

‘Blanket,’ she says, ‘please.’

He goes to a bag he’d come back with after disappearing for a few hours on the second day, having finally been able (convinced) to detach himself from her bed, where he’d practically handcuffed himself that first twenty-four hours.

And comes back with some truly ugly bed socks.

‘I love you,’ she says.

It comes out of her mouth with a sincerity she will never be able to take back, even if she wanted to, and she surprises them both with it. They pause, and stare at each other, Clint with the socks halfway in his mouth so he can bite the plastic of the tag off, and Laura white-knuckling the sheets over her broken legs and bruised hips.

‘I love you, too,’ he says, with just as much sincerity, more, even. But with the weird tightness he gets when he’s brushing things aside.

So it’s there, hovering between them, a live and known and burning thing between them, static electricity and exposed wiring in water, and they clear their throats, and he eases the socks over her casts, and she laughs and she laughs and then she cries.

He kicks his shoes off (he’d also obtained civilian clothes, in that time, jeans and a pair of black and purple Nikes – the new CB II ones? Maybe? She’s out of touch – and unshaven, because shaving was for the weak) and digs an arm underneath her so he can get her up and over enough to give him space in the cot next to her. Then he buries his face in her neck and cries too.

* * *

 

They release her back to New York the next day. Fury sends over a van that was clearly kitted out for this kind of exact purpose. Coulson is driving, and Clint thanks him for having sense before climbing into the back with Laura. They play snap for the first part of the drive, and then very carefully don’t talk about what they’d kind of not really said in full honesty for the remainder.

* * *

 

Fury comes to see her as soon as she’s installed in her private room at HQ’s infirmary. (Maggie will not be far behind him, clearly hovering around the end of the corridor until he’s gone before barging in and making a fuss of things, the way that Maggie is good at doing.)

‘You alright?’ he asks, and she offers him a bland sort of smile, lips pulled in to stop them shaking.

He hums, and drags a chair over. Clint shifts in his chair, the other side of the bed, and Fury snorts.

‘You can go,’ he says, and Clint straightens. ‘Now, Barton. Go piss in a flowerbed or something.’

Clint looks at her, and she looks at him, and she looks at Fury to say, ‘go on, Clint, I’ll be alright.’

‘I’ll go get a coffee,’ he says, getting to his feet, and there’s something so enamouring of him trying to have any kind of authority over his boss that makes her heart flip-flop.

‘Good,’ Fury says, still looking at Laura. The dryness of his expression threatens to make her smile for real.

Clint lingers at the door, and then he’s gone, door slamming shut behind him.

Fury waits, counts seconds on his fingers, and then says, ‘I’m sorry that you had to go through this, Laura.’

Her lip wobbles. He takes her hand.

She swallows, and nods. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Nick,’ he says, and she makes a horrible noise in her throat, a choked off sob that sounds like an animal coming back from the dead.

For a minute, he leaves her be, just holds her hand, and she breathes hard through her mouth – nose and cheekbone, as it turned out, were broken, and they’d worked their magic, but breathing through her nose just isn’t happening at the moment – to force the tears down. Fury is her boss, and he’s a good man, but he doesn’t need her falling to pieces on him. This is her debrief, her mission report, she can’t be in pieces for it.

‘You can fall apart,’ he tells her, so soft that she thinks she’s imagining it, ‘I’ve got nowhere else to be.’

She nods, and breathes some more. ‘I need – I need to – report.’

‘You’ve got nothing to report right now,’ he assures her, squeezing her hand again. ‘Barton’s told me everything, and Coulson’s given me the rest. I’ve sent another team in to finish up where they left off. All I need from you is to breathe.’

‘I don’t know who it was,’ she says, ‘I don’t – they just came. In the night – I was supposed to – I was meant to go running with Clint, in the morning. I heard the door go, and I thought it was odd, because the chain was across, and I got up and – and – I don’t remember.’

She touches a mostly-healed slice on her ribs, one that only training with Clint had kept from being lethal, and shakes her head.

‘Will I ever remember?’ she asks.

‘Probably,’ Fury nods.

She nods, and stares at her hand in his for a minute.

‘Don’t reprimand him, for what he did. Whatever he did do. He did it for me, so it’s – it’s my fault. I know you didn’t want me to compromise him any further, and I – I’m sorry, that I – failed.’

‘You didn’t fail,’ he tells her, and squeezes her hand so hard it hurts. ‘You did just fine, Agent. Barton was compromised where you’re concerned from the day he met you. If anything, we’ve been underestimating you.’

‘I don’t want a promotion,’ she tells him.

‘Do you want to retire from active service?’

It’s a fair question. She’s had the shit kicked out of her ten ways to Sunday, and the S.H.I.E.L.D. medical department are working their magic and healing her up – she should be out of casts by the end of next week – but she’s – she’s –

‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘I’m in too much pain.’

Which is a fair answer, and one that Fury respects.

‘Alright,’ he nods, and lets go of her hand to press his palm warm and – dare she thinks it – fatherly, against her crown. ‘Get some rest. I’ll let your guard dog back in, and we’ll see where we go from there.’

* * *

 

Fury comes back a week later, and brings with him a package.

‘I’ve got a mission for your boy,’ he says, and Clint doesn’t even protest it.

They’re sharing the paper. Clint wants to take her home, but the doctors are outranking him at every turn. He tried to complain to Coulson, who technically outranks them, but Coulson pulled rank and Clint has been sulking about it ever since.

‘I don’t want a mission,’ he says.

‘Hush up,’ Laura says, hand gentle on his arm. The bruising has mostly gone.

‘It’s an easy mission,’ Fury says, and hands her the manila.

She flips it open and scans the front page, picking out keywords the way that Clint had always done it, and then goes back to read it properly when it doesn’t make any sense. Clint reads the keywords, because all her attempts to help him with his reading haven’t really gotten anywhere, because he’s always been too busy staring at her to pay much attention to how his brain twists his letters around, and then waits for her to fill him in.

‘Sir,’ she says, and Clint looks up to see Fury almost smiling.

‘Pack your bags,’ he says, ‘you’re off to Italy.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and im back! Kind of! Hallelujah!
> 
> I really enjoyed writing this chapter, because I love hurting the emotions of my dearest friends with horrible things done to their favourite characters
> 
> Hope you enjoyed lovelies~!


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